A Modeling Study on Particle Dispersion in Wall-Bounded Turbulent Flows

Three physical mechanisms which may affect dispersion of particle's motion in wall-bounded turbulent flows, including the effects of turbulence, wall roughness in particle-wall collisions, and inter-particle collisions, are numerically investigated in this study. Parametric studies with different wall roughness extents and with different mass loading ratios of particles are performed in fully developed channel flows with the Eulerian-Lagrangian approach. A low-Reynolds-number k-epsilon turbulence model is applied for the solution of the carrier-flow field, while the deterministic Lagrangian method together with binary-collision hard-sphere model is applied for the solution of particle motion. It is shown that the mechanism of inter-particle collisions should be taken into account in the modeling except for the flows laden with sufficiently low mass loading ratios of particles. Influences of wall roughness on particle dispersion due to particle-wall collisions are found to be considerable in the bounded particle-laden flow. Since the investigated particles are associated with large Stokes numbers, i.e., larger than O(1), in the test problem, the effects of turbulence on particle dispersion are much less considerable, as expected, in comparison with another two physical mechanisms investigated in the study.