Particle-resolved simulations of four-way coupled, polydispersed, particle-laden flows

TL;DR

This paper introduces a collocated-grid framework for direct numerical simulations of polydisperse particle-laden flows, effectively coupling fluid and particle forces and validating against experimental data.

Contribution

The paper develops a modified collocated-grid immersed boundary method for simulating polydisperse particles in viscous flows, scalable on high-performance computing platforms.

Findings

Successfully validated against experimental results

Reproduces power law relationship in fluidized beds

Effective coupling of fluid-particle and particle-particle forces

Abstract

We present a collocated-grid framework for Direct Numerical Simulations of polydisperse particles submerged in a viscous fluid. The fluid-particle forces are coupled with the Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) while the particle-particle forces are modeled with a combination of contact and lubrication models, adapted for collocated grids. Our method is modified from the staggered-grid IBM of previous authors to a collocated-grid IBM by adapting the fluid and particle solvers. The method scales well on high-performance parallel computing platforms. It has been validated against various cases and is able to reproduce experimental results. Tuning parameters have been thoroughly calibrated to ensure the accuracy of the method. Finally, we demonstrate the capability of the method to simulate both monodispersed and bidispersed fluidized beds and reproduce the power law relationship between the inflow velocity and the porosity.