Dynamics of impurities in a three-dimensional volume-preserving map

We study the dynamics of inertial particles in three-dimensional incompressible maps, as representations of volume-preserving flows. The impurity dynamics has been modeled, in the Lagrangian framework, by a six-dimensional dissipative bailout embedding map. The fluid-parcel dynamics of the base map is embedded in the particle dynamics governed by the map. The base map considered for the present study is the Arnold-Beltrami-Childress (ABC) map. We consider the behavior of the system both in the aerosol regime, where the density of the particle is larger than that of the base flow, as well as the bubble regime, where the particle density is less than that of the base flow. The phase spaces in both the regimes show rich and complex dynamics with three types of dynamical behaviors--chaotic structures, regular orbits, and hyperchaotic regions. In the one-action case, the aerosol regime is found to have periodic attractors for certain values of the dissipation and inertia parameters. For the aerosol regime of the two-action ABC map, an attractor merging and widening crisis is identified using the bifurcation diagram and the spectrum of Lyapunov exponents. After the crisis an attractor with two parts is seen, and trajectories hop between these parts with period 2. The bubble regime of the embedded map shows strong hyperchaotic regions as well as crisis induced intermittency with characteristic times between bursts that scale as a power law behavior as a function of the dissipation parameter. Furthermore, we observe a riddled basin of attraction and unstable dimension variability in the phase space in the bubble regime. The bubble regime in the one-action case shows similar behavior. This study of a simple model of impurity dynamics may shed light upon the transport properties of passive scalars in three-dimensional flows. We also compare our results with those seen earlier in two-dimensional flows.