Thibault Maurel-Ouija, a Ph.D. candidate in applied mathematics at Aix-Marseille University, will be presenting work on a methodological framework that advances the fundamental understanding of turbulent flows and also holds potential for significant applications in environmental modeling.

Abstract

Inertial particle-laden turbulent flows, which exhibit multiscale clusters and voids, play a crucial role in a wide array of natural and engineering systems. The formation and destruction of clusters is critical, and the particle velocity divergence plays a key role for the dynamics. We present innovative mathematical tools for analyzing the behavior and dynamics of heavy inertial particles in homogeneous isotropic turbulence using tessellation techniques. By assigning a volume to each particle using a modified Voronoi tessellation, and by assessing the volume variation in time, we investigate the convergence, divergence, curl and likewise the helicity of the particle velocity. This approach has been applied to three-dimensional isotropic turbulence data from high resolution direct numerical simulations, including a range of seven Stokes numbers with and without the effects of gravity. Furthermore, we introduce a multiresolution analysis to evaluate the divergence in particle distributions across multiple scales. This analysis provides insights into the scales at which cluster formation and destruction are most intense, influenced by the Stokes number and gravity. This methodological framework not only advances our fundamental understanding of turbulent flows but also holds potential for significant applications in environmental modeling, such as predicting pollutant dispersion in atmospheric systems, and in industrial contexts, where understanding particle behavior is essential for optimizing processes like aerosol formation and fuel spray dynamics.

Biography

Mr. Thibault Maurel–Oujia is a Ph.D. candidate in applied mathematics specializing in fluid dynamics at the Institute of Mathematics of Marseille, Aix-Marseille University (France). His doctoral research focuses on the dynamics of inertial particles in turbulence and advanced numerical analysis. He combines rigorous theoretical approaches with high-fidelity direct numerical simulations to explore flow physics.