Deformation of ellipsoidal droplets in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence

We examine the statistics of the deformation of sub-Kolmogorov droplets in homogeneous isotropic turbulence (HIT). Data obtained with various phenomenological ellipsoidal models (EMs) -- assuming that the droplet preserves the ellipsoidal shape at all times -- are compared with ground-truth data obtained with three-dimensional fully resolved simulations (FRSs), without any ad-hoc assumption on the droplet shape. We find that some EM models show close agreement with FRS data across the range of capillary numbers explored. Given the computational expense of FRS the possibility to generate ensembles of data with quantitatively validated EMs in shorter times could be useful for some purposes.