Deformation of ellipsoidal droplets in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence

2025/06/11 by Fabio Guglietta, Guglietta, Fabio, Diego Taglienti +3 · 1 citation
Engineering · #Particle Dynamics in Fluid Flows #Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer #Innovative Microfluidic and Catalytic Techniques Innovation

paper · pdf · doi:10.48550/arxiv.2506.09692

Abstract

We study the statistics of deformation of neutrally buoyant droplets in homogeneous isotropic turbulence (HIT), wherein the characteristic droplet size R is smaller than the characteristic Kolmogorov scale η of the turbulent flow. We systematically focus on the characterization of droplet statistics obtained with various phenomenological ellipsoidal models (EMs) -- assuming that the droplet preserves the ellipsoidal shape at all times - with the droplet moving as a passive tracer in the turbulent flow. The predictions of the EMs are compared with ground-truth data obtained with three-dimensional fully resolved simulations (FRSs) without any ad-hoc assumption on the droplet shape. Our work helps in elucidating the applicability of the EMs in describing droplet deformation in HIT at changing the capillary number Ca=τ_σ/τ_η, weighting the relative importance of the droplet characteristic time τ_σ with respect to the turbulent flow characteristic time τ_η.

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