Universality and Intermittency of Pair Dispersion in Turbulence

Turbulence can disperse a concentrated parcel of pollutants at a rate over nine orders of magnitude higher than its purely diffusive counterpart. One intriguing signature of turbulent dispersion is its superdiffusive scaling. However, the universality of this scaling law is still in question. By leveraging a new laboratory facility, particle pairs with small initial separations can be tracked over four decades of separation in time and five decades of separation in squared displacement, thereby observing the full range of dispersion scaling laws. The results show that the classical Richardson cubic scaling will be reached not for an initial separation asymptotically close to zero but at a critical value, and this value does not appear to depend on the Reynolds number, providing an effective way to study universal dispersion dynamics. Additionally, the results agree well with the prediction based on the multifractal model and may help reconcile different reported scaling laws from laboratory experiments and field studies.