Hydrodynamic force interaction of two fixed spheres in a wall-bounded linear shear flow

Abstract

We examine the modulations of the drag coefficient Cd and lift coefficient Cl on a spherical particle caused by the presence of a neighboring sphere when positioned in close proximity to a wall. Data are generated through the utilization of a fast and accurate Particle-Resolved Direct Numerical Simulation (PR-DNS) method that relies on the Direction-Splitting algorithm and that was extensively validated in our prior study (Goyal and Wachs, 2023a, 2023b; Morente et al., 2023). We further validate the method in the flow configuration of the present study by comparing them with data published in the literature. We consider three Reynolds numbers Re=20, Re=50 and Re=100, which describe the flow conditions in the vicinity of the wall. The primary sphere is positioned at a distance δ from the wall, while the neighboring sphere is positioned at a constant distance from the primary sphere encompassing all possible angular positions θ. We report the modulations of Cd and Cl compared to a situation without any neighboring sphere as a function of δ, θ and Re. The inclusion of a wall intensifies the influence of the neighboring sphere on the primary sphere and significantly modifies the values of Cd and Cl. We attempt to relate the values of the modulations of Cd and Cl to the modulations in the contours of the pressure and of the spanwise vorticity on the surface of the primary sphere. We take advantage of the periodic nature of Cd and Cl as a function of the relative angular position θ of the neighboring sphere and propose a Fourier Predictive Model (FPM) to effectively represent the data using a finite number of modes in the cosine Fourier series. We show that our FPM is able to estimate the modulations of Cd and Cl excellently with a coefficient of determination R2≳0.99 in the parameter space investigated in our study.