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Abstract:
Particles that are heavy compared to the fluid in which they are
embedded (inertial particles) tend to cluster in turbulent flow, with the degree
of clustering depending on the particle Stokes number. The phenomenon is
relevant to a variety of multiphase flows, including atmospheric clouds; in most
realistic systems, particles have a continuous distribution of sizes and therefore
the clustering of ‘polydisperse’ particle populations is of special relevance. In
this part of the study, measurements of spatial correlations of particles in high-
Reynolds-number turbulence are compared with the results of a direct numerical
simulation of particle-laden turbulence. The experimentally derived radial
distribution functions (RDFs) exhibit a pronounced scale break at approximately
10–30 times the Kolmogorov scale, with large-scale clustering arising from
