Turbulent diffusion of small particles

The diffusion of small, spherical, rigid particles suspended in an incompressible turbulent fluid, but not interacting with each other, was studied. As a stochastic process, the turbulent fluid velocity field is assumed to be homogeneous, isotropic and stationary. Assuming the Stokes regime, a particle of equation of motion is used which includes only the effects of Stokes drag and a virtual mass force and an exact solution is found for the particle velocity correlation function, for all times and initial conditions, in terms of a fluid velocity correlation function measured along the motion of the particle. This shows that for times larger than a certain time scale, the particle velocity correlation becomes stationary. The effect of small shears in the fluid velocity was considered, under the additional restrictions of a certain high frequency regime for the turbulence. The shears convected past the particle much faster than the growth of the boundary layer. New force terms due to the presence of such shears are calculated and incorporated into the equation of motion. A perturbation solution to this equation is constructed, and the resultant particle velocity correlation function and diffusion coefficient are calculated. To lowest order, the particle diffusivity is found to be unaltered by the presence of small mean flow shears. The last model treated is one in which particles traverse a turbulent fluid with a large mean velocity. Among other restrictions, linearized form drag is assumed. The diffusion coefficient for such particles was calculated, and found to be much smaller than the passive scalar diffusion coefficient. This agrees within 5 percent with the experimental results of Snyder and Lumley