Divide and Conquer: a geometric approach to harnessing turbulence

Turbulence is often associated with chaos and unpredictability, making it difficult to control and exploit. We will present an approach to shape and manipulate turbulent flows in ways that give rise to organized and functional behavior, based on the idea of exploiting sustained gradients in turbulent intensity. We begin by creating structures on the mm scale that create sharp gradients between turbulence and quiescence. We then harness these gradients to direct the motion and distribution of tracer particles on the millimeter scale. By tuning the geometry, it is possible to selectively concentrate or dilute the tracer particles based on their size. Our results show that the chaotic collection of multiscale eddies that make up a turbulent flow can be transformed into a tool for inducing transport and structure, paving the way to new approaches to interact with and harness complex flows.