The influence of Reynolds and Froude number on the motion of settling, bidisperse inertial particles in turbulence

TL;DR

This study uses DNS to explore how Reynolds and Froude numbers influence the motion of settling bidisperse inertial particles in turbulence, revealing complex interactions between gravity, turbulence scales, and particle accelerations.

Contribution

It provides new insights into the combined effects of Reynolds and Froude numbers on particle accelerations and relative velocities in turbulent flows with gravity.

Findings

Reducing Froude number enhances particle accelerations but suppresses intermittency.

Gravity amplifies the effect of Reynolds number on accelerations for particles with Stokes number > 1.

Turbulence significantly influences vertical relative velocities even for fast-settling particles.

Abstract

Using Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS), we examine the effects of Taylor Reynolds number, $R_\lambda$, and Froude number, $Fr$, on the motion of settling, bidisperse inertial particles in isotropic turbulence. Particle accelerations play a key role in the relative motion of bidisperse particles, and we find that reducing $Fr$ leads to an enhancement of the accelerations, but a suppression of their intermittency. For Stokes numbers $St>1$, the effect of $R_\lambda$ on the accelerations is enhanced by gravity, since settling causes the particle accelerations to be affected by a larger range of flow scales. The results for the Probability Density Function (PDF) of the particle relative velocities show that for bidisperse particles, decreasing $Fr$ leads to an enhancement of their relative velocities in both the vertical (parallel to gravity) and horizontal directions. Importantly, our results show that even when the particles are settling very fast, turbulence continues to play a key role in their vertical relative velocities, and increasingly so as $R_\lambda$ is increased. This occurs because although the settling velocity may be much larger than typical velocities of the turbulence, due to intermittency, there are significant regions of the flow where the turbulence contribution to the particle motion is of the same order as that from gravitational settling...