The scattering of sound-wave perturbations from vortex excitations in hydrodynamic systems with typical Bose-Einstein-condensate (BEC) parameters is investigated by numerical integration of the associated Klein-Gordon equation. The simulations indicate that at sufficiently high angular speeds, in the perturbative limit where back-reaction effects can be neglected, sound wave packets can extract a sizable fraction of the vortex energy through a mechanism of superradiant scattering. It is conjectured that this superradiant regime may be detectable in BEC experiments.

A lattice version of the Fokker-Planck equation, accounting for dissipative interactions, not resolved on the molecular scale, is applied to the study of electrorheological transport of a one-dimensional charged fluid, and is found to yield quantitative agreement with a recent analytical solution.

The Lagrangian statistics of heavy particles and of fluid tracers transported by a fully developed turbulent flow are investigated by means of high resolution direct numerical simulations. The Lagrangian velocity structure functions are measured in a time range spanning about three decades, from a tenth of the Kolmogorov time scale, tau(eta), up to a few large-scale eddy turnover times. Strong evidence is obtained that fluid tracer statistics are contaminated in the time range tau is an element of[1:10]tau(eta) by a bottleneck effect due to vortex filament. This effect is found to be significantly reduced for heavy particles which are expelled from vortices by inertia. These findings help in clarifying the results of a recent study by H. Xu [Phys. Rev. Lett. 96, 024503 (2006)], where differences between experimental and numerical results on scaling properties of fluid tracers were reported. (c) 2006 American Institute of Physics.

We present the results of direct numerical simulations of heavy particle transport in homogeneous, isotropic, fully developed turbulence, up to resolution 512(3) (R-lambda approximate to 185). Following the trajectories of up to 120 million particles with Stokes numbers, St, in the range from 0.16 to 3.5 we are able to characterize in full detail the statistics of particle acceleration. We show that: (i) the root-mean-squared acceleration arms sharply falls off from the fluid tracer value at quite small Stokes numbers; (ii) at a given St the normalized acceleration a(rms)/(is an element of(3)/nu)(1/4) increases with R-lambda consistently with the trend observed for fluid tracers; (iii) the tails of the probability density function of the normalized acceleration a/a(rms) decrease with St. Two concurrent mechanisms lead to the above results: preferential concentration of particles, very effective at small St. and filtering induced by the particle response time, that takes over at larger St.

We present the results of direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulent flows seeded with millions of passive inertial particles. The maximum Reynolds number is Re-lambda similar to 200. We consider particles much heavier than the carrier flow in the limit when the Stokes drag force dominates their dynamical evolution. We discuss both the transient and the stationary regimes. In the transient regime, we study the growth of inhomogeneities in the particle spatial distribution driven by the preferential concentration out of intense vortex filaments. In the stationary regime, we study the acceleration fluctuations as a function of the Stokes number in the range St is an element of [0.16 : 3.3]. We also compare our results with those of pure fluid tracers ( St = 0) and we find a critical behavior of inertia for small Stokes values. Starting from the pure monodisperse statistics we also characterize polydisperse suspensions with a given mean Stokes, (St) over bar.

We introduce and discuss a three-dimensional mesoscopic lattice Boltzmann model for the numerical simulation of strongly-interacting fluids with dynamic inhomogeneities. The model is based on an extension of the standard lattice Boltzmann dynamics in which streaming between neighboring lattice sites is constrained by the value of the nonlocal density of the surrounding fluid. The resulting dynamics exhibits typical features of dynamically heterogeneous fluids, such as long-time relaxation, non-Gaussian density distributions and dynamic heterogeneities. Due to its intrinsically parallel dynamics and absence of statistical noise, the method is expected to compute significantly faster than molecular dynamics, Monte Carlo, and lattice glass models.

The Frenet-Serret curve analysis is extended from nonnull to null trajectories in a generic spacetime using the Newman-Penrose formalism, recovering old results which are not well known and clarifying the associated Fermi-Walker transport which has been left largely unexplored in the literature. This machinery is then used to discuss null circular orbits in stationary axisymmetric spacetimes using the Kerr spacetime as a concrete example, and to integrate the equations of parallel transport along null geodesics in any spacetime.

The circular motion of spinning massive test particles in the spacetime of a rotating Kerr black hole is investigated in the case in which the components of the spin tensor are allowed to vary along the orbit.

This work is concerned with the semiclassical approximation of the Schro ̈dinger-Poisson equation modeling ballistic transport in a 1D periodic potential by means of WKB techniques. It is derived by considering the mean-field limit of a N-body quantum problem, then K-multivalued solutions are adapted to the treatment of this weakly nonlinear system obtained after homogenization without taking into account for Paulis exclusion principle. Numerical experiments display the behaviour of self-consistent wave packets and screening effects

A direct numerical simulation of a turbulent flow field with a lattice BGK method is presented. A spatial coarse graining of the numerical results is compared with the expected LBGK dynamics for a flow field on a reduced lattice size. This comparison permits to exhibit subgrid properties of the fluid which are not resolved on the coarse lattice. As expected from existing subgrid models, an effective viscosity can be measured that increases when the lattice is coarse grained. Turbulence models based on an effective viscosity are particularly interesting in a lattice Boltzmann simulation, due to the linearity of the propagation operator.

It is shown that homogeneous Rayleigh-Bénard flow, i.e., Rayleigh-Bénard turbulence with periodic boundary conditions in all directions and a volume forcing of the temperature field by a mean gradient, has a family of exact, exponentially growing, separable solutions of the full nonlinear system of equations. These solutions are clearly manifest in numerical simulations above a computable critical value of the Rayleigh number. In our numerical simulations they are subject to secondary numerical noise and resolution dependent instabilities that limit their growth to produce statistically steady turbulent transport.

The phenomenon of apparent slip in micro-channel flows is analyzed by means of a two-phase mesoscopic lattice Boltzmann model including non-ideal fluid-fluid and fluid-wall interactions. The weakly inhomogeneous limit of this model is solved analytically. The present mesoscopic approach permits to access much larger scales than molecular dynamics, and comparable with those attained by continuum methods. However, at variance with the continuum approach, the existence of a gas layer near the wall does not need to be postulated a priori, but emerges naturally from the underlying non-ideal mesoscopic dynamics. It is therefore argued that a mesoscopic lattice Boltzmann approach with non-ideal fluid-fluid and fluid-wall interactions might achieve an optimal compromise between physical realism and computational efficiency for the study of channel micro-flows.

We present a mesoscopic model of the fluid–wall interactions for flows in microchannel geometries. We define a suitable implementation of the boundary conditions for a discrete version of the Boltzmann equations describing a wall-bounded single-phase fluid. We distinguish different slippage properties on the surface by introducing a slip function, defining the local degree of slip for hydrodynamical fields at the boundaries. The slip function plays the role of a renormalizing factor which incorporates, with some degree of arbitrariness, the microscopic effects on the mesoscopic description. We discuss the mesoscopic slip properties in terms of slip length, slip velocity, pressure drop reduction (drag reduction), and mass flow rate in microchannels as a function of the degree of slippage and of its spatial distribution and localization, the latter parameter mimicking the degree of roughness of the ultra-hydrophobic material in real experiments. We also discuss the increment of the slip length in the transition regime, i.e. at ${O}(1)$ Knudsen numbers. Finally, we compare our results with molecular dynamics investigations of the dependence of the slip length on the mean channel pressure and local slip properties and with the experimental dependence of the pressure drop reduction on the percentage of hydrophobic material deposited on the surface.

The effect of bubbles on fully developed turbulent flow is investigated numerically and experimentally, summarizing the results of our previous papers (Mazzitelli et al., 2003, Physics of Fluids15, L5. and Journal of Fluid Mechanics488, 283; Rensen, J. et al. 2005, Journal of Fluid Mechanics538, 153). On the numerical side, we simulate Navier–Stokes turbulence with a Taylor–Reynolds number of Re?˜60, a large large-scale forcing, and periodic boundary conditions. The point-like bubbles follow their Lagrangian paths and act as point forces on the flow. As a consequence, the spectral slope is less steep as compared to the Kolmogorov case. The slope decrease is identified as a lift force effect. On the experimental side, we do hot-film anemometry in a turbulent water channel with Re? ˜ 200 in which we have injected small bubbles up to a volume percentage of 3%. Here the challenge is to disentangle the bubble spikes from the hot-film velocity signal. To achieve this goal, we have developed a pattern recognition scheme. Furthermore, we injected microbubbles up to a volume percentage of 0.3%. Both in the counter flowing situation with small bubbles and in the co-flow situation with microbubbles, we obtain a less spectral slope, in agreement with the numerical result.