Two-way coupled turbulence simulations of gas-particle flows using point-particle tracking

This paper addresses computational models for dilute gas-particle multiphase flow in which the three dimensional, time-dependent fluid motion is calculated in an Eulerian frame, and a large number of particles are tracked in a Lagrangian frame. Point forces are used to represent the back effect of the particles on the turbulence. The paper describes the early development of the technique, summarizes several experiments which show how dilute particle loadings can significantly alter the turbulence, and demonstrates how the point-particle method fails when the particles are comparable in scale to the small scale turbulence. High-resolution simulations and experiments which demonstrate the importance of the flow details around individual particles are described. Finally, opinions are stated on how future model development should proceed. (C) 2009 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.