Critical dispersion of advecting-diffusing tracers in periodic landscapes of hard-wall symmetric potentials

Phys Rev E Stat Nonlin Soft Matter Phys. 2013 Jun;87(6):060102. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevE.87.060102. Epub 2013 Jun 14.

Abstract

Large-scale, time-asymptotic dispersion properties of diffusing tracers dragged by a uniform drive through a two-dimensional periodic lattice of hard-wall symmetric potentials are investigated. Dispersion is quantified by a typically anisotropic effective diffusivity tensor D, whose eigenvalues and eigenvectors depend on the dimensionless bare diffusivity 1/Pe for each given lattice geometry. Attention is focused on critical lattice geometries yielding sustained macroscale dispersion D([perpendicular]) along the direction orthogonal to the uniform drive in the limit where Pe→∞. A simple one-dimensional model is proposed, which predicts the anomalous scaling D([perpendicular])~1/[A(1)+A(2)log(Pe)].

MeSH terms

  • Computer Simulation
  • Convection*
  • Diffusion*
  • Energy Transfer*
  • Models, Chemical*
  • Models, Molecular*
  • Oscillometry / methods*
  • Rheology / methods*