Does a particle swept by a turbulent liquid diffuse?

Moshe Schwartz, Gad Frenkel and Sam F. Edwards

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications, 2014, vol. 398, issue C, 229-233

Abstract: We consider a particle swept by ordinary turbulent flow and find that its mean square displacement (MSD) is not linear in the traversed time, T, which would correspond to diffusion, but rather it is proportional to T raised to the power 6/5, for large times. This behavior stems from correlations of the velocity field, on length scales much larger than the largest scale corresponding to the inertial range. We derive our results using two different methods. The first employs an analytic self consistent path integral formulation for obtaining the statistics of the trajectory of a swept particle, given the correlations of the flow. The second involves a numerical solution of an integro-differential equation for the MSD. The conditions which make it possible to observe this behavior are discussed. A by-product of our considerations is the general large T behavior of the MSD for a large family of flows, which includes ordinary turbulence as a special case.

Keywords: Passive scalar; Super diffusion; Turbulence (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2014
References: View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (2)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S0378437113011448
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only. Journal offers the option of making the article available online on Science direct for a fee of $3,000

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:eee:phsmap:v:398:y:2014:i:c:p:229-233

DOI: 10.1016/j.physa.2013.12.020

Access Statistics for this article

Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications is currently edited by K. A. Dawson, J. O. Indekeu, H.E. Stanley and C. Tsallis

More articles in Physica A: Statistical Mechanics and its Applications from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().