Turbulent suspensions of heavy particles in incompressible flows have gained
much attention in recent years. A large amount of work focused on the impact
that the inertia and the dissipative dynamics of the particles have on their
dynamical and statistical properties. Substantial progress followed from the
study of suspensions in model flows which, although much simpler, reproduce
most of the important mechanisms observed in real turbulence. This paper
presents recent developments made on the relative motion of a pair of particles
suspended in time-uncorrelated and spatially self-similar Gaussian flows. This
review is complemented by new results. By introducing a time-dependent Stokes
number, it is demonstrated that inertial particle relative dispersion recovers
asymptotically Richardson's diffusion associated to simple tracers. A
perturbative (homogeneization) technique is used in the small-Stokes-number
asymptotics and leads to interpreting first-order corrections to tracer
dynamics in terms of an effective drift. This expansion implies that the
correlation dimension deficit behaves linearly as a function of the Stokes
number. The validity and the accuracy of this prediction is confirmed by
numerical simulations.Comment: 15 pages, 12 figure