Stress balance for a viscous flow with a single rolling particle

Abstract

One of the most important aspects in hydraulic engineering is to describe flows over mobile porous media in a continuum sense to derive models for sediment transport. This remains a challenging task due to the complex coupling of the particle and the fluid phase. Computational Fluid Dynamics can provide the data needed to understand the coupling of the two phases. To this end, we carry out grain-resolving Direct Numerical Simulations of multiphase flow. The particle phase is introduced by the Immersed Boundary Method and the particle-particle interaction is described by a sophisticated Discrete Element Method. We derive the stress budgets of the fluid and the particle phases separately through a rigorous analysis of the governing equations using the Double Averaging Methodology and the Coarse-Graining Method. As a next step, we perform a simple simulation of a heavy particle exposed to a Poiseuille flow rolling along a wall to understand the physical implications of the fluid-particle coupling. All terms of the stress balances can be computed in a straightforward manner allowing to close the budgets for the two phases separately. However, we encounter problems when attempting to combine the fluid-resolved local stresses with the coarse-grained particle stresses into a single balance for the fluid-particle mixture.