Twist, turn and encounter: the trajectories of small atmospheric particles unravelled

Solid atmospheric particles, such as ice crystals, pollen, dust, ash and microplastics, strongly influence Earth’s climate, ecosystems and air quality. Previous studies have typically relied on analytical models valid only for very small particles or experiments in liquids, where the particle-to-fluid density ratio $R$ is much lower than values encountered in the atmosphere. We combine a novel experimental set-up with particle-resolved direct numerical simulations to study the settling of sub-millimetre ellipsoids in still air. Particle shapes span elongation and flatness values $ 0.2 \leqslant {\textit{EL}}, {\textit{FL}} \leqslant 1.0$ at a density ratio $ R = 1000$ and particle Reynolds numbers $ 2.1 \lt {\textit{Re}}_{\!p} \lt 4.5$ , a regime well below the onset of wake-induced instabilities. Nonetheless, we observe unexpectedly rich dynamics: all non-spherical particles exhibit damped oscillatory motion, and some triaxial ellipsoids follow fully three-dimensional, non-planar trajectories due to rotation about all three axes. Simulations at lower density ratios ( $ R = 10, 100$ ) confirm that these behaviours are driven by strong lateral forces happening only at $R=1000$ . Key settling characteristics exhibit nonlinear and non-trivial dependencies on shape. In the two-dimensional phase space of elongation and flatness, settling velocity is symmetric about the principal diagonal ( $ {\textit{EL}} = {\textit{FL}}$ ), while oscillation frequency and damping rate show symmetry about the anti-diagonal. Flatness strongly influences pressure drag, while elongation governs lateral drift and swept volume, which can reach up to ten times the particle diameter and four times the volume-equivalent sphere, respectively.