Introducing surface roughness in adhesion for stochastic and Rock'n’Roll models to describe particle resuspension in turbulent flows

Abstract

Resuspension of colloidal particles plays an important role in various environmental and industrial implications and is particularly influenced by the interactions at the particle-surface interface. Here we explore the effect of surface roughness on resuspension of colloidal particles by incorporating a phenomenological adhesion model that includes surface roughness into a stochastic resuspension model, and into the kinetic, probability-based approach Rock'n'Roll model to provide a more realistic description. Within this framework, we investigate the influence of stochasticity on the resuspended fraction and explore its dependence on particle size and surface roughness. Our findings show that introducing roughness into a stochastic resuspension scheme results in an increase of the resuspended fraction by an order of magnitude. Additionally, our results underscore the contribution of stochasticity in the resuspension process, in which the noise term enables the inclusion of important but less frequent events that contribute to the resuspension probabilities. In all, the introduction of roughness into both approaches result with a significant improvement in the reconstruction of experimental data, where the stochastic description shows better agreement.