2002/05/31 by Jörg Schumacher, Joerg Schumacher, Bruno Eckhardt · 2 citations
Engineering · Environmental Science · Physics and Astronomy · #Fluid Dynamics and Turbulent Flows #Hydrology and Sediment Transport Processes #Particle Dynamics in Fluid Flows #nlin.CD #physics.flu-dyn
paper · pdf · doi:10.1103/physreve.66.017303
published as Phys. Rev. E, 66 (2002) 017303 · 5 pages, 5 Postscript figures
openalex publication_date 2002/07/26 · arxiv created 2002/07/29 · arxiv updated 2009/11/30 · openalex created_date 2025/10/10 · openalex updated_date 2026/07/28
We study the formation of clusters of passive Lagrangian tracers in a nonsmooth turbulent flow in a flat free-slip surface as a model for particle dynamics on free surfaces. Single particle and pair dispersion show different behavior for short and large times: on short times particles cluster exponentially rapidly until patches of the size of the divergence correlation length are depleted; on larger times the pair dispersion is dominated by almost ballistic hopping between clusters. We also find that the distribution of particle density is close to algebraic and can trace this back to the exponential distribution of the divergence field of the surface flow.