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Updated: Aug 3, 2026

The Diffusion of Passive Tracers in Laminar Shear Flow
Published on: May 1, 2018
Selective sensitivity of open chaotic flows on inertial tracer advection: catching particles with a stick
I J Benczik1, Z Toroczkai, T Tél
1Institute for Theoretical Physics, Eötvös University, P.O. Box 32, H-1518 Budapest, Hungary.
Abstract:
We investigate the effects of finite size and inertia of a small spherical particle immersed in an open unsteady flow which, for ideal tracers, generates transiently chaotic trajectories. The inertia effects may strongly modify the chaotic motion to the point that attractors may appear in the configuration space. These studies are performed in a model of the two-dimensional flow past a cylindrical obstacle. The relevance to modeling efforts of biological pathogen transport in large-scale flows is discussed. Since the tracer dynamics is sensitive to the particle inertia and size, simple geometric setups in such flows could be used as a particle mixture segregator separating and trapping particles.
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