Preferential concentration and relative velocity statistics of inertial particles in Navier-Stokes turbulence with and without filtering

The radial distribution function (RDF, a statistical measure of preferential concentration), and the relative velocity measured along the line-of-centres of two particles are the key statistical inputs to the collision kernel for finite-inertia particles suspended in a turbulent flow Sundaram & Collins (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 335, 1997, p. 75). In this paper, we investigate the behaviour of these two-particle statistics using direct numerical simulation (DNS) of homogeneous isotropic turbulence. While it is known that the RDF for particles of any Stokes number (St) decreases with separation distance Sundaram & Collins (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 335, 1997, p. 75), Reade & Collins (Phys. Fluids, vol. 12, 2000, p. 2530), Salazar et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 600, 2008, p. 245), we observe that the peak in the RDF versus St curve shifts to higher St as we increase the separation distance. Here, St is defined as the ratio of the particle's viscous relaxation time to the Kolmogorov time-scale of the flow. Furthermore, as found in a previous study Wang, Wexler, & Zhou (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 415, 2000, p. 117), the variance of the radial relative velocity (w(r)) is found to increase monotonically with increasing separation distance and increasing Stokes number; however, we show for the first time that the parameteric variation of the skewness of w(r) with St and r/eta is qualitatively similar to that of the RDF, and points to a connection between the two. We then apply low-pass filters (using three different filter scales) on the DNS velocity field in wavenumber space in order to produce 'perfect' large-eddy simulation (LES) velocity fields without any errors associated with subgrid-scale modelling. We present visual evidence of the effect of sharp-spectral filtering on the flow structure and the particle field. We calculate the particle statistics in the filtered velocity field and find that the RDF decreases with filtering at low St and increases with filtering at high St, similar to Fede & Simonin (Phys. Fluids, vol. 18, 2006, p. 045103). We also find that the variation of the RDF with St shifts towards higher St with filtering at all separation distances. The variance of w(r) is found to decrease with filtering for all St and separation distances, but the skewness of w(r) shows a non-monotonic response to filtering that is qualitatively similar to the RDF. We consider the variation of the RDF and moments of w(r) with filter scale and find that they are approximately linear in the inertial range. We demonstrate that a simple model consisting of a redefinition of the St based on the time-scale of the filtered velocity field cannot recover the unfiltered statistics. Our findings provide insight on the effect of subgrid-scale eddies on the RDF and w(r), and establish the requirements of a LES model for inertial particles that can correctly predict clustering and collisional behaviour.