Clustering of heavy particles in vortical flows: a selective review

Abstract

Heavy particles in a turbulent flow tend to leave regions of high vorticity and cluster into regions of high strain. The consequences of such clustering have been studied in a variety of situations over the past few decades, and this problem has seen several review papers already. Our objectives in this paper are three-fold. (i) We introduce the reader to the basic ideas, and explain why the problem is interesting. (ii) Using an N-vortex system we present an interesting case where particles are attracted to the vicinity of vortices. A new scaling for the critical Stokes number of attraction is obtained. (iii) We review a number of papers, which are related to cloud physics in this context.