A comprehensive study of large eddy simulation models in capturing the dynamics of gas-particle turbulent suspensions

Abstract

The particle phase attenuates the fluid fluctuations with an increase in volume fraction, and a sudden collapse in the turbulence is observed at a particular particle volume fraction, called critical particle volume loading (CPVL) [P. Muramulla et al. J. Fluid Mech. 889, A28 (2020)]. The present study reports the capability of two different classes of large eddy simulation (LES), viz. anisotropic and eddy viscosity-based, models to capture the turbulence modulation and the sudden disruption of the fluid fluctuations in the particle-laden vertical channel flows. The simulations are performed at two bulk Reynolds numbers of 3300 and 5600 based on the channel width and the bulk averaged fluid velocity. Our study on different LES models shows that approximate deconvolution (ADM) and scale similarity (SS) models accurately predict the critical loading for the Reynolds number of 3300. However, these models predict the critical loading qualitatively only for the Reynolds number of 5600 in the sense that they fail to predict the discontinuity as shown by the direct numerical simulation (DNS) study. The coherent structure model (CSM) predicts the critical loading with an 80% accuracy at both Reynolds numbers. The energy spectral density, production, and particle-induced dissipation spectra are plotted to analyze the distribution across wavenumbers. For all the LES models, a decrease in more than one order of magnitude is observed in the energy spectrum density at the critical loading compared to the unladen flow. The energy density decreases more in the channel center than in the near-wall region for the same particle volume loading. The mean component of particle-induced dissipation is almost two orders of magnitude larger than the particle dissipation spectra of fluctuating energy. The magnitude of streamwise and spanwise dissipation spectra of fluctuating components is higher in the near-wall region than the channel center. However, the magnitude of wall-normal dissipation spectra is higher in the channel center than near the wall region.