Flow of particles suspended in a sheared viscous fluid: effects of finite inertia and inelastic collisions

We investigate in this article the macroscopic behavior of sheared suspensions of spherical particles. The effects of the fluid inertia, the Brownian diffusion, and the gravity are neglected. We highlight the influence of the solid-phase inertia on the macroscopic behavior of the suspension, considering moderate to high Stokes numbers. Typically, this study is concerned with solid particles O (100 microns) suspended in a gas with a concentration varying from 5% to 30%. A hard-sphere collision model (with elastic or inelasic rebounds) coupled with the particle Lagrangian tracking is used to simulate the suspension dynamics in an unbounded periodic domain. We first consider the behavior of the suspension with perfect elastic collisions. The suspension properties reveal a strong dependence on the particle inertia and concentration. Increasing the Stokes number from 1 to 10 induces an enhancement of the particle agitation by three orders of magnitude and an evolution of the probability density function of the fluctuating velocity from a highly peaked (close to the Dirac function) to a Maxwellian shape. This sharp transition in the velocity distribution function is related to the time scale which controls the overall dynamics of the suspension flow. The particle relaxation (resp. collision) time scale dominates the particulate phase behavior in the weakly (resp. highly) agitated suspensions. The numerical results are compared with the prediction of two statistical models based on the kinetic theory for granular flows adapted to moderately inertial regimes. The suspensions have a Newtonian behavior when they are highly agitated similarly to rapid granular flows. However, the stress tensors are highly anisotropic in weakly agitated suspensions as a difference of normal stresses arises. Finally, we discuss the effect of energy dissipation due to inelastic collisions on the statistical quantities. We also tested the influence of a simple modeling of local hydrodynamic interactions during the collision by using a restitution coefficient which depends on the local impact velocities