Instabilities in granular gas-solid flows

TL;DR

This paper performs an analytical linear stability analysis of granular gas-solid flows, revealing how the gas phase influences system stability and critical length, with results validated by numerical simulations.

Contribution

It provides an analytical solution for hydrodynamic modes in gas-solid flows, extending previous work by explicitly including the gas phase effects.

Findings

Gas phase decreases the critical length for instability.

Analytical hydrodynamic modes are derived as functions of system parameters.

Good agreement with numerical simulations for critical length.

Abstract

A linear stability analysis of the hydrodynamic equations with respect to the homogeneous cooling state is performed to study the conditions for stability of a suspension of solid particles immersed in a viscous gas. The dissipation in such systems arises from two different sources: inelasticity in particle collisions and viscous friction dissipation due to the influence of gas phase on solid particles. The starting point is a suspension model based on the (inelastic) Enskog kinetic equation where the effect of the interstitial gas phase on the dynamics of grains is modeled via a viscous drag force. The study is carried out in two different steps. First, the transport coefficients of the system are obtained by solving the Enskog equation by means of the Chapman-Enskog method up to first order in spatial gradients. Once the transport properties are known, then the corresponding linearized hydrodynamic equations are solved to get the dispersion relations. In contrast to previous studies [V. Garz\'o \emph{et al.}, Phys. Rev. E \textbf{93}, 012905 (2016)], the hydrodynamic modes are \emph{analytically} obtained as functions of the parameter space of the system. As expected, linear stability shows $d-1$ transversal (shear) modes (where $d$ is the dimensionality of the system) and a longitudinal "heat" mode to be unstable with respect to long enough wavelength excitations. The results also show that the main effect of gas phase is to decrease the value of the critical length $L_c$ (beyond which the system becomes unstable) with respect to its value for a dry granular fluid. Comparison with direct numerical simulations for $L_c$ shows a good agreement for conditions of practical interest.