Exact regularized point particle method for multi-phase flows in the two-way coupling regime

Particulate flows have been largely studied under the simplifying assumptions of one-way coupling regime where the disperse phase do not react-back on the carrier fluid. In the context of turbulent flows, many non trivial phenomena such as small scales particles clustering or preferential spatial accumulation have been explained and understood. A more complete view of multiphase flows can be gained calling into play two-way coupling effects, i.e. by accounting for the inter-phase momentum exchange between the carrier and the suspended phase, certainly relevant at increasing mass loading. In such regime, partially investigated in the past by the so-called Particle In Cell (PIC) method, much is still to be learned about the dynamics of the disperse phase and the ensuing alteration of the carrier flow. In this paper we present a new methodology rigorously designed to capture the inter-phase momentum exchange for particles smaller than the smallest hydrodynamical scale, e.g. the Kolmogorov scale in a turbulent flow. In fact, the momentum coupling mechanism exploits the unsteady Stokes flow around a small rigid sphere where the transient disturbance produced by each particle is evaluated in a closed form. The particles are described as lumped, point masses which would lead to the appearance of singularities. A rigorous regularization procedure is conceived to extract the physically relevant interactions between particles and fluid which avoids any "ah hoc" assumption. The approach is suited for high efficiency implementation on massively parallel machines since the transient disturbance produced by the particles is strongly localized in space around the actual particle position. As will be shown, hundred thousands particles can therefore be handled at an affordable computational cost as demonstrated by a preliminary application to a particle laden turbulent shear flow.Comment: Submitted to Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 56 pages, 15 figure

A high accuracy Leray-deconvolution model of turbulence and its limiting behavior

In 1934 J. Leray proposed a regularization of the Navier-Stokes equations whose limits were weak solutions of the NSE. Recently, a modification of the Leray model, called the Leray-alpha model, has atracted study for turbulent flow simulation. One common drawback of Leray type regularizations is their low accuracy. Increasing the accuracy of a simulation based on a Leray regularization requires cutting the averaging radius, i.e., remeshing and resolving on finer meshes. This report analyzes a family of Leray type models of arbitrarily high orders of accuracy for fixed averaging radius. We establish the basic theory of the entire family including limiting behavior as the averaging radius decreases to zero, (a simple extension of results known for the Leray model). We also give a more technically interesting result on the limit as the order of the models increases with fixed averaging radius. Because of this property, increasing accuracy of the model is potentially cheaper than decreasing the averaging radius (or meshwidth) and high order models are doubly interesting

Poloidal-toroidal decomposition in a finite cylinder. II. Discretization, regularization and validation

The Navier-Stokes equations in a finite cylinder are written in terms of poloidal and toroidal potentials in order to impose incompressibility. Regularity of the solutions is ensured in several ways: First, the potentials are represented using a spectral basis which is analytic at the cylindrical axis. Second, the non-physical discontinuous boundary conditions at the cylindrical corners are smoothed using a polynomial approximation to a steep exponential profile. Third, the nonlinear term is evaluated in such a way as to eliminate singularities. The resulting pseudo-spectral code is tested using exact polynomial solutions and the spectral convergence of the coefficients is demonstrated. Our solutions are shown to agree with exact polynomial solutions and with previous axisymmetric calculations of vortex breakdown and of nonaxisymmetric calculations of onset of helical spirals. Parallelization by azimuthal wavenumber is shown to be highly effective