Fluid-Particles Interactions in Stratified Environments – F-PISE

Our approach relies on the development of idealized laboratory studies to tackle the basic mechanisms of the three tasks mentioned, which will ultimately be combined with 3D direct numerical simulations and analytical modeling.

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Interactions between objects and the fluid they are suspended in is a vast area of research for homogeneous fluid mechanics, having its origin in the historic work of Stokes on sphere in viscous fluid, and still of great interest for nowadays research. However, many fields of application can be associated to stratified fluid mechanics. Transport (of sediments, biomass, pollutants) and mixing processes are important in Marine Biology for the settling of the biomass for instance, but also in Oceanography to understand the global circulation in the oceans. Important atmospheric events (dust storms, volcanic eruption, etc.) have a strong impact on air traffic and atmospheric modeling.

The main objective of this proposal is to address the problem of fluid-particles interactions in stratified fluids, setting this project at the crossing between two important branches of fluid mechanics, suspension dynamics and stratified flows. We aim at providing groundbreaking results on three different setups characteristic of stratified environments: the influence of quiescent stratified environment on the motion of a non-Brownian settling particle, the mechanical action of internal waves on freely floating objects and suspensions, and the dynamics of turbidity currents evolving in linearly stratified fluids. By considering each problem successively, we will examine several scales and dynamical regimes, with an increasing level of complexity. Starting from the local processes driving the interactions of a few objects (or particles), we then consider a large concentration of these objects, before considering their evolution in specific stratified flows associated to characteristic scales much larger than the one of the particles.

The originality of our approach relies on the development of idealized laboratory studies to tackle the basic mechanisms of the three tasks mentioned, which will ultimately be combined with 3D direct numerical simulations and analytical modeling. The researchers involved at Institut de Mécanique des Fluides de Toulouse (IMFT), host laboratory, and the collaborators from other institutions have the complementary skills to guarantee the success of the different tasks tackled.