Eur. Phys. J. E (2018) 41: 34
https://doi.org/10.1140/epje/i2018-11638-3

Regular Article

Computational study of radial particle migration and stresslet distributions in particle-laden turbulent pipe flow

¹ Department of Applied Physics, Eindhoven University of Technology, Den Dolech 2, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, Netherlands
² Istituto per le Applicazioni del Calcolo, Consiglio Nazionale delle Ricerche, Via dei Taurini 19, 00185, Rome, Italy
³ Department of Mathematics and Computer Science, Eindhoven University of Technology, Den Dolech 2, 5600 MB, Eindhoven, Netherlands

^* e-mail: a.gupta-1@tue.nl

Received: 1 October 2017
Accepted: 23 February 2018
Published online: 21 March 2018

Abstract

Particle-laden turbulent flows occur in a variety of industrial applications as well as in naturally occurring flows. While the numerical simulation of such flows has seen significant advances in recent years, it still remains a challenging problem. Many studies investigated the rheology of dense suspensions in laminar flows as well as the dynamics of point-particles in turbulence. Here we employ a fully-resolved numerical simulation based on a lattice Boltzmann scheme, to investigate turbulent flow with large neutrally buoyant particles in a pipe flow at low Reynolds number and in dilute regimes. The energy input is kept fixed resulting in a Reynolds number based on the friction velocity around 250. Two different particle radii were used giving a particle-pipe diameter ratio of 0.05 and 0.075. The number of particles is kept constant resulting in a volume fraction of 0.54% and 1.83%, respectively. We investigated Eulerian and Lagrangian statistics along with the stresslet exerted by the fluid on the spherical particles. It was observed that the high particle-to-fluid slip velocity close to the wall corresponds locally to events of high energy dissipation, which are not present in the single-phase flow. The migration of particles from the inner to the outer region of the pipe, the dependence of the stresslet on the particle radial positions and a proxy for the fragmentation rate of the particles computed using the stresslet have been investigated.