Methodology for numerical simulations of ellipsoidal particle‐laden flows

Overview & Synopsis

Despite being relevant in many natural and industrial processes, suspensions of nonspherical particles have been largely underinvestigated compared with the extensive analyses made on the gravity‐driven motions of spherical particles. One of the main reasons for this disparity is the difficulty of accurately correcting the short‐range hydrodynamic forces and torques acting on complex particles. These effects, also known as lubrication, are essential to the suspension of the particles and are usually poorly captured by direct numerical simulation of particle‐laden flows. In this article, we propose a partitioned volume penalization‐discrete element method solver, which estimates the unresolved hydrodynamic forces and torques. Corrections are made locally on the surface of the interacting particles without any assumption on the particle global geometry. Numerical validations have been made using ellipsoidal particles immersed in an incompressible Navier‐Stokes flow.