Numerical study of transport phenomena in particle suspensions

Suspensions of solid particles in a viscous liquid are of scientific and technological interest in a wide range of applications. Sediment transport in estuaries, blood flow in the human body, pyroclastic flows from volcanos and pulp fibers in papermaking are among the examples. Often, these particulate flows also include heat transfer among the two phases or the fluid might exhibit a viscoelastic behavior. Predicting these flows and the heat transfer within requires a vast knowledge of how particles are distributed across the domain, how particles affect the flow field and finally how they affect the global behavior of the suspension. The aim of this work is therefore to improve the physical understanding of these flows, including the effect of physical and mechanical properties of the particles and the domain that bounds them.To this purpose, particle-resolved direct numerical simulations (PR-DNS) of spherical/non-spherical particles in different flow regimes and geometries are performed, using an efficient/accurate numerical tool that is developed within this work. The code is based on the Immersed Boundary Method (IBM) for the fluid-solid interactions with lubrication, friction and collision models for the close range particle-particle (particle-wall) interactions, also able to resolve for heat transfer equation in both Newtonian and non-Newtonian fluids. Several conclusions are drawn from this study, revealing the importance of the particle's shape and inertia on the global behavior of a suspension, e.g. spheroidal particles tend to cluster while sedimenting. This phenomenon is observed here for both particles with high inertia, sedimenting in a quiescent fluid and inertialess particles (point-like tracer prolates) settling in homogeneous isotropic turbulence. The mechanisms for clustering is indeed different between these two situations, however, it is the shape of the particles that governs these mechanisms, as clustering is not observed for spherical particles. Another striking finding of this work is drag reduction in particulate turbulent channel flow with disk-like spheroidal particles. Again this drag reduction is absent for spherical particles, which instead increase the drag with respect to single-phase turbulence. In particular, we show that inertia at the particle scale induces a non-linear increase of the heat transfer as a function of the volume fraction, unlike the case at vanishing inertia where heat transfer increases linearly within the suspension