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Preferential concentration of noninertial buoyant particles in the ocean mixed layer under free convection

Tomás Chor

Di Yang

Charles Meneveau

Marcelo Chamecki*

  • Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA

  • Department of Mechanical Engineering, Cullen College of Engineering, University of Houston, Houston, Texas 77204-4006, USA

  • Department of Mechanical Engineering, Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, Maryland 21218, USA

  • Department of Atmospheric and Oceanic Sciences, University of California, Los Angeles, Los Angeles, California 90095, USA

  • *Corresponding author: chamecki@ucla.edu
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Phys. Rev. Fluids 3, 064501 – Published 28 June, 2018

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1103/PhysRevFluids.3.064501

Abstract

In this work we investigate buoyant particle dynamics in the ocean mixed layer (OML) under a purely convective regime. We focus on noninertial particles that are lighter than the surrounding seawater (thus, buoyant), which is a useful configuration when representing oil, microplastic debris, and other buoyant materials that do not necessarily exhibit strong inertial effects. Our main goal is to understand and describe the physical mechanisms that control the buoyant particles' surface concentration under such conditions, specifically the preferential concentration effects that arise independently of inertia (rather than the well-known centrifuging mechanism for heavy particles). In our investigation we use large-eddy simulation to model the particle dispersion in the OML in which the evolution of the particle field is simulated using an Eulerian approach. We find that in addition to the preferential concentration effect that clusters particles into convergence regions on the surface (which is a well-known and straightforward effect on free surfaces), there is a secondary effect for highly buoyant particles that drives them into vorticity-dominated regions. We explain this effect as the advection of buoyant particles by persistent vortices in the flow, which turns out to be the dominating mechanism controlling the surface particle distribution. Highly buoyant particles are trapped in the interior of the vortices (at the surface), which favors clustering in vorticity-dominated regions, while for particles with low buoyancy this effect is negligible.

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Corrections

17 August, 2018

Correction: The data availability statement has now been relocated and anchored with complete source information.

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Phys. Rev. Fluids 3, 064501– Published 28 June, 2018
  • Received 27 March 2018
  • Corrected 17 August 2018
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