Irregular dependence on Stokes number and non-ergodic transport of heavy inertial particles in steady laminar flows

Small heavy particles in a fluid flow respond to the flow on a time-scale proportional to their inertia, or Stokes number St. Their behaviour is thought to be gradually modified as St increases. We show, in the steady spatially-periodic laminar Taylor-Green flow, that particle dynamics, and their effective diffusivity, actually change in an irregular, non-monotonic and sometimes discontinuous manner, with increasing St. At Stokes of order one, we show chaotic particle motion, contrasting earlier conclusions for heavy particles in the same flow (Wang et al. 1992). Particles may display trapped orbits, or unbounded diffusive or ballistic dispersion, with the vortices behaving like scatterers in a soft Lorentz gas (Klages et al. 2019). The dynamics is non-ergodic. We discuss the possible consequences of our findings for particulate turbulent flows.