Preferential concentration by mechanically-driven turbulence in the two-fluid formalism

Abstract: Preferential concentration is thought to play a key role in promoting particle growth, which is crucial to processes such as warm rain formation in clouds, planet formation, and industrial sprays. In this work, we investigate preferential concentration using 3D Direct Numerical Simulations adopting the Eulerian-Eulerian two-fluid approach, where the particles are treated as a continuum field with its own momentum and mass conservation laws. We consider particles with Stokes number $St \lesssim O(0.01)$ in moderately turbulent flows with fluid Reynolds number $Re \leq 600$. In our previous work (Nasab & Garaud, Physical Review Fluids. doi: 10.1103/PhysRevFluids.5.114308, 2020), we established scaling laws to predict maximum and typical particle concentration enhancements in the context of the particle-driven convective instability. Here we verify that the same results apply when turbulence is externally driven, extending the relevance of our model to a wider class of particle-laden flows. We find in particular that (i) the maximum particle concentration enhancement above the mean scales as $u_{rms}^2 \tau_p / \kappa_p$, where $u_{rms}$ is the rms fluid velocity, $\tau_p$ is the particle stopping time, and $\kappa_p$ is the assumed particle diffusivity from the two-fluid equations; (ii) the typical particle concentration enhancement over the mean scales as $(u_{rms}^2 \tau_p / \kappa_p)^{1/2}$; and (iii) the probability distribution function of the particle concentration enhancement over the mean has an exponential tail whose slope scales like $(u_{rms}^2 \tau_p /\kappa_p)^{-1/2}$. We conclude by discussing the caveats of our model and its implications in a relevant cloud application.