Particle flows around an intruder

Abstract

Particle flows injected as beams and scattered by an intruder are numerically studied. We find a crossover of the drag force from Epstein's law to Newton's law, depending on the ratio of the speed to the thermal speed. These laws can be reproduced by a simple analysis of a collision model between the intruder and particle flows. The crossover from Epstein's law to Stokes' law is also found for the low-speed regime as the time evolution of the drag force caused by beam particles. We also show the existence of turbulent-like behavior of the particle flows behind the intruder with the aid of the second invariant of the velocity gradient tensor and the relative mean square displacement for the high-speed regime and a large intruder.