Memoryless drop breakup in turbulence

DOI

The breakup of drops and bubbles in turbulent fluids is a key mechanism in many environmental and engineering processes. Even in the well-studied dilute case, quantitative descriptions of drop fragmentation remain elusive and empirical models continue to proliferate. We here investigate drop breakup by leveraging a novel computer code, which enables the generation of ensembles of experiments with thousands of independent, fully-resolved simulations. We show that in homogeneous isotropic turbulence breakup is a memoryless process whose rate depends only on the Weber number. A simple model based on the computed breakup rates can accurately predict experimental measurements and demonstrates that dilute emulsions evolve through a continuous fragmentation process with exponentially increasing time scales. Our results suggest a non-vanishing breakup rate below the critical Kolmogorov-Hinze diameter, challenging the current paradigm of inertial drop fragmentation.

Identifier
DOI https://doi.org/10.1594/PANGAEA.951271
Related Identifier References https://doi.org/10.1126/sciadv.abp9561
Metadata Access https://ws.pangaea.de/oai/provider?verb=GetRecord&metadataPrefix=datacite4&identifier=oai:pangaea.de:doi:10.1594/PANGAEA.951271
Provenance
Creator Vela-Martín, Alberto ORCID logo; Avila, Marc ORCID logo
Publisher PANGAEA
Publication Year 2022
Rights Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International; https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/
OpenAccess true
Representation
Resource Type Dataset
Format text/tab-separated-values
Size 60 data points
Discipline Earth System Research