We consider a system coupling the incompressible Navier–Stokes equations to the Vlasov–Fokker–Planck equation. Such a problem arises in the description of particulate flows. We design a numerical scheme to simulate the behavior of the system. This scheme is asymptotic-preserving, thus efficient in both the kinetic and hydrodynamic regimes. It has a numerical stability condition controlled by the non-stiff convection operator, with an implicit treatment of the stiff drag term and the Fokker–Planck operator. Yet, consistent to a standard asymptotic-preserving Fokker–Planck solver or an incompressible Navier–Stokes solver, only the conjugate–gradient method and fast Poisson and Helmholtz solvers are needed. Numerical experiments are presented to demonstrate the accuracy and asymptotic behavior of the scheme, with several interesting applications.

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The diffusive transport of passive tracers or particles can be enhanced by incompressible, turbulent flow fields. Analyzing the effective behavior is a challenging problem with theoretical and practical importance in many areas of science and engineering, ranging from the transport of mass, heat, and pollutants in geophysical flows to sea ice dynamics and turbulent combustion. The long time, large scale behavior of such systems is equivalent to an enhanced diffusion process with an effective diffusivity tensor D*. Two different formulations of integral representations for D* were developed for the case of time-independent fluid velocity fields, involving spectral measures of bounded self-adjoint operators acting on vector fields and scalar fields, respectively. Here, we extend both of these approaches to the case of space-time periodic velocity fields, allowing for chaotic dynamics, providing rigorous integral representations for D* involving spectral measures of unbounded self-adjoint operators.We prove the different formulations are equivalent. Their correspondence follows from a one-to-one isometry between the underlying Hilbert spaces. We also develop a Fourier method for computing D*, which captures the phenomenon of residual diffusion related to Lagrangian chaos of a model flow. This is reflected in the spectral measure by a concentration of mass near the spectral origin.

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We establish local higher integrability estimates for upper gradients of vector-valued parabolic quasi-minimizers in metric measure spaces, satisfying a doubling property and supporting a weak Poincaré inequality.