Intricate Relations Among Particle Collision, Relative Motion and Clustering in Turbulent Clouds: Computational Observation and Theory

Abstract

Considering turbulent clouds containing small inertial particles, we investigate the effect of particle collision, in particular collision-coagulation, on particle clustering and particle relative motion. We perform direct numerical simulation (DNS) of coagulating particles in isotropic turbulent flow in the regime of small Stokes number ($St=0.001-0.54$) and find that, due to collision-coagulation, the radial distribution functions (RDFs) fall-off dramatically at scales $r \sim d\,\,$ (where $d$ is the particle diameter) to small but finite values, while the mean radial-component of particle relative velocities (MRV) increase sharply in magnitudes. Based on a previously proposed Fokker-Planck (drift-diffusion) framework, we derive a theoretical account of the relationship among particle collision-coagulation rate, RDF and MRV. The theory includes contributions from turbulent-fluctuations absent in earlier mean-field theories. We show numerically that the theory accurately accounts for the DNS results (i.e., given an accurate RDF, the theory could produce an accurate MRV). Separately, we also propose a phenomenological model that could directly predict MRV and find that it is accurate when calibrated using fourth moments of the fluid velocities. We use the model to derive a general solution of RDF. We uncover a paradox: the past empirical success of the differential version of the theory is theoretically unjustified. We see a further shape-preserving reduction of the RDF (and MRV) when the gravitational settling parameter ($S_g$) is of order $O(1)$. Our results demonstrate strong coupling between RDF and MRV and imply that earlier isolated studies on either RDF or MRV have limited relevance for predicting particle collision rate.