Effect of energy spectrum law on clustering patterns for inertial particles subjected to gravity in Kinematic Simulation

Abstract

We study the clustering of inertial particles using a periodic kinematic simulation. Particles clustering is observed for different pairs of Stokes number and Froude number and different spectral power laws ($1.4 \leqslant p \leqslant 2.1$). The main focus is to identify and then quantify the effect of $p$ on the clustering attractor - by attractor we mean the set of points in the physical space where the particles settle when time tends to infinity. It is observed that spectral power laws can have a dramatic effect on the attractor shape. In particular, we observed a new attractor type which was not present in previous studies for Kolmogorov spectra ($p=5/3$).