Preferential concentration and settling of heavy particles in homogeneous turbulence

Abstract

Voronoï diagrams are used to analyze one-way coupling direct numerical simulation data of heavy particles settling in homogeneous turbulence. Preferential concentration and clustering of the inertial particles are analyzed for an extended range of particle Stokes and Rouse numbers. Influence of preferential concentration on the settling velocity enhancement is addressed from statistics of particle and flow field quantities conditioned on the local concentration. While gravity is found to have almost no influence on the global characteristics of preferential concentration, the conditional statistics bring out a refined preferential sampling of the flow field resulting from the gravitational effects. This preferential sampling shows that beside the descending fluid velocity contribution, the settling velocity is further increased by the descending fluid acceleration. This effect cannot be detected from global estimations of the particle concentration field. A 2D analysis of the Voronoï cells is also presented to investigate their shape and orientation. It is found that clusters can be represented as 2D elongated manifolds. Their shape is shown to be similar in zero and non-zero gravity fields while Voronoï cells tend to be more elongated for Stokes numbers around unity. Under the gravity effects, they tend to be preferentially oriented perpendicularly to the gravitational axis.