Collision efficiency of droplets across diffusive, electrostatic and inertial regimes

Abstract

Rain drops form in clouds by collision of submillimetric droplets falling under gravity: larger drops fall faster than smaller ones and collect them on their path. The puzzling stability of fogs and non-precipitating warm clouds with respect to this avalanching mechanism has been a longstanding problem. How to explain that droplets of diameter around $10~{\rm \mu m}$ have a low probability of collision, inhibiting the cascade towards larger and larger drops? Here we review the dynamical mechanisms that have been proposed in the literature and quantitatively investigate the frequency of drop collisions induced by Brownian diffusion, electrostatics and gravity, using an open-source Monte-Carlo code that takes all of them into account. Inertia dominates over aerodynamic forces for large drops, when the Stokes number is larger than $1$. Thermal diffusion dominates over aerodynamic forces for small drops, when the P\'eclet number is smaller than $1$. We show that there exists a range of size (typically $1-10~{\rm \mu m}$ for water drops in air) for which neither inertia nor Brownian diffusion are significant, leading to a gap in the collision rate. The effect is particularly important, due to the lubrication film forming between the drops immediately before collision, and secondarily to the long-range aerodynamic interaction. Two different mechanisms regularise the divergence of the lubrication force at vanishing gap: the transition to a noncontinuum regime in the lubrication film, when the gap is comparable to the mean free path of air, and the induction of a flow inside the drops due to shear at their surfaces. In the gap between inertia-dominated and diffusion-dominated regimes, dipole-dipole electrostatic interactions becomes the major effect controlling the efficiency of drop collisions.