Direct Numerical Simulation of Particle Transport and Dispersion in Wall-Bounded Turbulent Flows

Author(s):

Alexandre D Leonelli, Luis G Bravo, and Eckart Meiburg

Abstract:

The multiphase wall-bounded turbulence resolving capabilities of particle-laden flows via immersed boundaries (PARTIES), an academic in-house particle-resolving direct numerical simulation code (Biegert et al. 2017; Vowinckel et al. 2019) is validated against Picano et al. (2015). Particle-turbulence interactions in wall-bounded flows is a problem of great importance in order to predict particle transport, aggregation, and deposition for a broad range of engineering applications. In this work, four simulations of turbulent channel flow of dense suspensions are performed. The suspensions comprise neutrally buoyant particles immersed in a Newtonian fluid with volume fractions of Φ = {0,0.05,0.1,0.2}. Coupling between the fluid and solid phases is achieved by the Immersed Boundary Method. The mean streamwise fluid velocity, local solid volume fraction, and solid-phase velocity are examined and found to be in good agreement with reference data. PARTIES appears to slightly underestimate the wall shear stress, which may be attributed to a discrepancy in the applied pressure gradient and Reynolds number. Despite the small inconsistencies, PARTIES successfully captures the relevant internal flow physics reported by Picano et al. (2015) and is a promising tool to study particle-laden systems of relevance to the Army.