Stochastic model for the alignment and tumbling of rigid fibres in two-dimensional turbulent shear flow

Abstract: Non-spherical particles transported by an anisotropic turbulent flow preferentially align with the mean shear and intermittently tumble when the local strain fluctuates. Such an intricate behaviour is here studied for inertialess, rod-shaped particles embedded in a two-dimensional turbulent flow with homogeneous shear. A Lagrangian stochastic model for the rods angular dynamics is introduced and compared to the results of direct numerical simulations. The model consists in superposing a short-correlated random component to the steady large-scale mean shear, and can thereby be integrated analytically. To reproduce the single-time orientation statistics obtained numerically, it is found that one has to properly account for the combined effect of the mean shear, for anisotropic velocity gradient fluctuations, and for the presence of persistent rotating structures in the flow that bias Lagrangian statistics. The model is then used to address two-time statistics. The notion of tumbling rate is extended to diffusive dynamics by introducing the stationary probability flux of the rods unfolded angle. The model is found to reproduce the long-term effects of an average shear on the mean and the variance of the fibres angular increment. Still, it does not reproduce an intricate behaviour observed in numerics for intermediate times: the unfolded angle is there very similar to a L\'evy walk with distributions of increments displaying intermediate power-law tails.