Convective stability of turbulent Boussinesq flow in the dissipative   range and flow around small particles
  We consider arbitrary, possibly turbulent, Boussinesq flow which is smooth below a dissipative scale $l_d$. It is demonstrated that the stability of the flow with respect to growth of fluctuations with scale smaller than $l_d$ leads to a non-trivial constraint. That involves the dimensionless strength $Fl$ of fluctuations of the gradients of the scalar in the direction of gravity and the Rayleigh scale $L$ depending on the Rayleigh number $Ra$, the Nusselt number $Nu$ and $l_d$. The constraint implies that the stratified fluid at rest, which is linearly stable, develops instability in the limit of large $Ra$. This limits observability of solution for the flow around small swimmer in quiescent stratified fluid that has closed streamlines at scale $L$ [A. M. Ardekani and R. Stocker, Phys. Rev. Lett. 105, 084502 (2010)]. Correspondingly to study the flow at scale $L$ one has to take turbulence into account. We demonstrate that the resulting turbulent flow around small particles or swimmers can be described by scalar integro-differential advection-diffusion equation. Describing the solutions we show that closed streamlines persist with finite probability. Our results seem to be the necessary basis in understanding flows around small swimmers. 
Itzhak Fouxon and Alexander Leshansky
nlin.CD physics.flu-dyn