Attenuation mechanism of wall-bounded turbulence by heavy finite-size particles

Abstract

To elucidate the attenuation mechanism of wall-bounded turbulence due to heavy small particles, we conduct direct numerical simulations (DNS) of turbulent channel flow laden with finite-size solid particles. When particles cannot follow the swirling motions of wall-attached vortices, vortex rings are created around the particles. These particle-induced vortices lead to additional energy dissipation, reducing the turbulent energy production from the mean flow. This mechanism results in the attenuation of turbulent kinetic energy, which is more significant when the Stokes number of particles is larger or particle size is smaller under the condition that the volume fraction of particles is fixed. Moreover, we propose the method to quantitatively predict the degree of turbulence attenuation without using DNS data by estimating the additional energy dissipation rate in terms of particle properties.