Numerical Study of Particle Dispersion in the Wake of Two Tandem Square Cylinders Using Discrete Vortex Method

Abstract

This study has been conducted to investigate numerically the particle dispersion in the wake of dilute particle-laden gas flows past two identical square cylinders in tandem arrangement at Reynolds number of 10,000,000. In the numerical method, the discrete vortex method is employed to calculate the gas flow fields, and the Lagrangian approach is applied to track individual solid particles. A dispersion function is defined to represent the lateral dispersion scale of particles. The wake vortex patterns and the distributions of particles with various Stokes numbers ranging from 0.01 to 10 are obtained. The numerical results reveal that: (1) the particles with St = 0.01 can distribute both in the vortex core and around the vortex periphery, whereas the particles with St = 1.0, 10 congregate mainly around the vortex periphery; (2) the particles with St = 0.01, 0.1 are trapped by the vortices into the gap between the two square cylinders, while very few particles with St = 1.0, 10 are distributed within the gap; (3) the particle's dispersion intensity along the lateral direction decreases greatly as St is increased from 0.01 to 10.