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Phys. Rev. E 77, 020101(R) (2008) [4 pages]

Effective transport in random shear flows

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Marco Dentz*
Department of Geotechnical Engineering and Geosciences, Technical University of Catalonia (UPC), Barcelona, Spain

Tanguy Le Borgne
Géosciences Rennes, UMR 6118, CNRS, Université de Rennes 1, Rennes, France

Jesus Carrera
Institute of Earth Sciences Jaume Almera, CSIC, Barcelona, Spain

Received 6 July 2007; revised 11 October 2007; published 6 February 2008

We obtain an effective transport description for the superdiffusive motion of random walkers in stratified flow by projection of the process on the direction of stratification. The effective dimensionally reduced motion is shown to describe a correlated random walk characterized by the Lagrangian velocity correlation. We analyze the projected motion through exact analytical solutions for the distribution density for an arbitrary correlated Gaussian noise and derive an evolution equation for the one-point and conditional two-point displacement densities. The latter gives an explicit effective equation for superdiffusive transport in stratified random flow and demonstrates that the displacement density has a Gaussian scaling form for all times.

© 2008 The American Physical Society

URL:
http://link.aps.org/doi/10.1103/PhysRevE.77.020101
DOI:
10.1103/PhysRevE.77.020101
PACS:
05.40.Fb, 05.10.Gg, 05.60.−k, 92.40.Kf

*marco.dentz@upc.edu