Principal Investigator Themistoklis Sapsis
Inertial (or finite-sized) particles in fluid flows are commonly encountered in natural phenomena and industrial processes. Examples of inertial particles include dust, impurities, droplets, and air bubbles, with applications in pollutant transport in the ocean and atmosphere, rain initiation, coexistence between plankton species in the hydrosphere, and even planet formation by dust accretion in the solar system. Finite-size or inertial particle dynamics in fluid flows can differ markedly from infinitesimal particle dynamics: both clustering and dispersion are well-documented phenomena in inertial particle motion, while they are absent in the incompressible motion of infinitesimal particles.