Numerical study of non-spherical/spherical particles in laminar and turbulent flows

Abstract: The presence of solid rigid particles alters the global transport and rheological properties of the mixture in complex (and often unpredictable) ways. In recent years a few studies have been devoted to investigating the behavior of dense suspensions in the turbulent/inertial regime with the majority of theses analyses limited to mono-disperse rigid neutrally-buoyant spheres. However, one interesting parameter that is rarely studied for particles with high inertia is the particle shape. Spheroidal particles introduce an anisotropy, e.g. a tendency to orient in a certain direction, which can affect the bulk behavior of a suspension in an unexpected ways. The main focus of this study is therefore to investigate the behavior of spheroidal particles and their effect on turbulent/inertial flows.We perform fully resolved simulations of particulate flows with spherical/spheroidal particles, using an efficient/accurate numerical approach that enables us to simulate thousands of particles with high resolutions in order to capture all the fluid-solid interactions.Several conclusions are drawn from this study that reveal the importance of particle's shape effect on the behaviour of a suspension e.g. spheroidal particles tend to cluster while sedimenting. This phenomenon is observed in this work for both particles with high inertia, sedimenting in a quiescent fluid and inertialess particles (point-like tracer prolates) settling in homogenous isotropic turbulence. The mechanisms for clustering is indeed different between these two situations, however, it is the shape of particles that governs these mechanisms, as clustering is not observed for spherical particles. Another striking finding of this work is drag reduction in particulate turbulent channel flow with rigid oblate particles. Again this drag reduction is absent for spherical particles, which instead increase the drag with respect to single-phase turbulence.