Particle dispersion in two-dimensional turbulence: a comparison with 2-D kinematic simulation

Abstract

We study numerically the comparison between Lagrangian experiments on turbulent particle dispersion in 2-D turbulent flows performed, on the one hand, on the basis of direct numerical simulations (DNS) and, on the other hand, using kinematic simulations (KS). Eulerian space-time structure of both DNS and KS dynamics are not comparable, mostly due to the absence of strong coherent vortices and advection processes in the KS fields. The comparison allows to refine past studies about the contribution of nonhomogeneous space-time 2-D Eulerian structure on the turbulent absolute and relative particle dispersion processes. We particularly focus our discussion on the Richardson’s regime for relative dispersion.