PARTICLE DISPERSION SIMULATION IN TURBULENT FLOW DUE TO PARTICLE-PARTICLE AND PARTICLE-WALL COLLISIONS

Simulation of the 3-D, fully developed turbulent channel flows laden with various mass loading ratios of particles is made using an Eulerian-Lagrangian approach in which the carrier-fluid flow field is solved with a low-Reynolds-number k-epsilon turbulence model while the deterministic Lagrangian method together with binary-collision hard-sphere model is applied for the solution of particle motion. Effects of interparticle collisions and particle-wall collisions under different extents of wall roughness on particle dispersion are addressed in the study. A cost-effective searching algorithm of collision pair among particles is developed. It is found that the effects of inter-particle collisions on particle dispersion cannot be negligible when the ratio of the mean free time of particle to the mean particle relaxation time of particle is less or equal to O(10). In addition, the wall roughness extent plays an important role in the simulation of particle-wall collisions particularly for cases with small mass loading ratios.