Direct numerical simulation of liquid-gas-solid flows is uncommon due to the
considerable computational cost. As the grid spacing is determined by the
smallest involved length scale, large grid sizes become necessary -- in
particular if the bubble-particle aspect ratio is on the order of 10 or larger.
Hence, it arises the question of both feasibility and reasonability. In this
paper, we present a fully parallel, scalable method for direct numerical
simulation of bubble-particle interaction at a size ratio of 1-2 orders of
magnitude that makes simulations feasible on currently available
super-computing resources. With the presented approach, simulations of bubbles
in suspension columns consisting of more than 100000 fully resolved
particles become possible. Furthermore, we demonstrate the significance of
particle-resolved simulations by comparison to previous unresolved solutions.
The results indicate that fully-resolved direct numerical simulation is indeed
necessary to predict the flow structure of bubble-particle interaction problems
correctly.Comment: submitted to International Journal of Computational Fluid Dynamic