Effects of settling on inertial particle slip velocity statistics in wall bounded flows

TL;DR

This study develops a statistical framework and uses simulations to analyze how inertial particles settle and interact with turbulence near walls, revealing dominant mechanisms and implications for modeling dust transport.

Contribution

Introduces a continuum equations framework for slip velocity moments and identifies key mechanisms controlling slip velocity variance in turbulent boundary layers.

Findings

Slip velocity variance is mainly controlled by local differences between 'seen' and particle velocity variance.

Vertical mean slip increases rapidly with Sv+, reducing relative variance at high Sv+.

Good agreement with existing models at low Sv+, with some systematic errors at higher Sv+.

Abstract

Developing reduced order models for the transport of solid particles in turbulence typically requires a statistical description of the particle-turbulence interactions. In this work, we utilize a statistical framework to derive continuum equations for the moments of the slip velocity of inertial settling Lagrangian particles in a turbulent boundary layer. Using coupled Eulerian-Lagrangian direct numerical simulations, we then identify the dominant mechanisms controlling the slip velocity variance, and find that for a range of St+, Sv+, and Re, the slip variance is primarily controlled by local differences between the "seen" variance and the particle velocity variance, while terms appearing due to the inhomogeneity of the turbulence are sub-leading until Sv+ becomes large. We also consider several comparative metrics to assess the relative magnitudes of the fluctuating slip velocity and the mean slip velocity, and we find that the vertical mean slip increases rapidly with Sv+, rendering the variance relatively small -- an effect found to be most substantial for Sv+>1. Finally, we compare the results to a model of the acceleration variance Berk and Coletti (2021) based the concept of a response function described in Csanady (1963), highlighting the role of the crossing trajectories mechanism. We find that while there is good agreement for low Sv+, systematic errors remain, possibly due to implicit non-local effects arising from rapid particle settling and inhomogeneous turbulence. We conclude with a discussion of the implications of this work for modeling the transport of coarse dust grains in the atmospheric surface layer.