Effect of turbulence on collisional growth of cloud droplets

TL;DR

This study uses high-resolution simulations to explore how turbulence influences the collisional growth of cloud droplets, revealing the dependence on energy dissipation rate and the interplay with gravity in raindrop formation.

Contribution

It provides new insights into turbulence-induced droplet collisions, quantifies the impact of energy dissipation rate, and compares turbulence effects with gravity in droplet growth.

Findings

Collision rate increases with the square root of energy dissipation rate.

Droplet size distribution follows a power law with slope -3.7.

Turbulence enhances early-stage collisional growth, but gravity dominates later.

Abstract

We investigate the effect of turbulence on the collisional growth of um-sized droplets through high- resolution numerical simulations with well resolved Kolmogorov scales, assuming a collision and coalescence efficiency of unity. The droplet dynamics and collisions are approximated using a superparticle approach. In the absence of gravity, we show that the time evolution of the shape of the droplet-size distribution due to turbulence-induced collisions depends strongly on the turbulent energy-dissipation rate, but only weakly on the Reynolds number. This can be explained through the energy dissipation rate dependence of the mean collision rate described by the Saffman-Turner collision model. Consistent with the Saffman-Turner collision model and its extensions, the collision rate increases as the square root of the energy dissipation rate even when coalescence is invoked. The size distribution exhibits power law behavior with a slope of -3.7 between a maximum at approximately 10 um up to about 40 um. When gravity is invoked, turbulence is found to dominate the time evolution of an initially monodisperse droplet distribution at early times. At later times, however, gravity takes over and dominates the collisional growth. We find that the formation of large droplets is very sensitive to the turbulent energy dissipation rate. This is due to the fact that turbulence enhances the collisional growth between similar sized droplets at the early stage of raindrop formation. The mean collision rate grows exponentially, which is consistent with the theoretical prediction of the continuous collisional growth even when turbulence-generated collisions are invoked. This consistency only reflects the mean effect of turbulence on collisional growth.