The effect of droplet coalescence on drag in turbulent channel flows

TL;DR

This study uses direct numerical simulations to compare how droplet coalescence affects drag in turbulent channel flows, revealing that coalescing droplets minimally impact drag while non-coalescing ones significantly increase it due to their different wall-normal distributions.

Contribution

It demonstrates that droplet coalescence reduces drag increase by causing droplets to aggregate away from the wall, contrasting with non-coalescing droplets that enter the viscous sublayer and increase drag.

Findings

Coalescing droplets cause less than 4% drag increase at 10% volume fraction.

Non-coalescing droplets increase drag by about 30% at 10% volume fraction.

Droplet distribution affects the shear stress and drag in turbulent flows.

Abstract

We study the effect of droplet coalescence on turbulent wall-bounded flows, by means of direct numerical simulations. In particular, the volume-of-fluid and front-tracking methods are used to simulate turbulent channel flows containing coalescing and non-coalescing droplets, respectively. We find that coalescing droplets have a negligible effect on the drag, whereas the non-coalescing ones steadily increase drag as the volume fraction of the dispersed phase increases: indeed, at 10\% volume fraction, the non-coalescing droplets show a 30\% increase in drag, whereas the coalescing droplets show less than 4\% increase. We explain this by looking at the wall-normal location of droplets in the channel and show that non-coalescing droplets enter the viscous sublayer, generating an interfacial shear stress which reduces the budget for viscous stress in the channel. On the other hand, coalescing droplets migrate towards the bulk of the channel forming large aggregates, which hardly affect the viscous shear stress while damping the Reynolds shear stress. We prove this by relating the mean viscous shear stress integrated in the wall-normal direction to the centreline velocity.