Turbulent pair dispersion as a ballistic cascade phenomenology

Abstract

Since the pioneering work of Richardson in 1926, later refined by Batchelor and Obukhov in 1950, it is predicted that the rate of separation of pairs of fluid elements in turbulent flows with initial separation at inertial scales, grows ballistically first (Batchelor regime), before undergoing a transition towards a super-diffusive regime where the mean-square separation grows as $t^{3}$ (Richardson regime). Richardson empirically interpreted this super-diffusive regime in terms of a non-Fickian process with a scale-dependent diffusion coefficient (the celebrated Richardson’s ‘$4/3$rd’ law). However, the actual physical mechanism at the origin of such a scale dependent diffusion coefficient remains unclear. The present article proposes a simple physical phenomenology for the time evolution of the mean-square relative separation in turbulent flows, based on a scale-dependent ballistic scenario rather than a scale-dependent diffusive. It is shown that this phenomenology accurately retrieves most of the known features of relative dispersion for particles mean-square separation, among others: (i) it is quantitatively consistent with most recent numerical simulations and experiments for mean-square separation between particles (both for the short-term Batchelor regime and the long-term Richardson regime, and for all initial separations at inertial scales); (ii) it gives a simple physical explanation of the origin of the super-diffusive $t^{3}$ Richardson regime which naturally builds itself as an iterative process of elementary short-term scale-dependent ballistic steps; (iii) it shows that the Richardson constant is directly related to the Kolmogorov constant (and eventually to a ballistic persistence parameter); and (iv) in a further extension of the phenomenology, taking into account third-order corrections, it robustly describes the temporal asymmetry between forward and backward dispersion, with an explicit connection to the cascade of energy flux across scales. An important aspect of this phenomenology is that it simply and robustly connects long-term super-diffusive features to elementary short-term mechanisms, and at the same time it connects basic Lagrangian features of turbulent relative dispersion (both at short and long times) to basic Eulerian features of the turbulent field: second-order Eulerian statistics control the growth of separation (both at short and long times) while third-order Eulerian statistics control the temporal asymmetry of the dispersion process, which can then be directly identified as the signature of the energy cascade and associated to well-known exact results as the Karman–Howarth–Monin relation.