Acceleration of small heavy particles in homogeneous shear flow: direct numerical simulation and stochastic modelling of under-resolved intermittent turbulence

The acceleration of inertial particles in a homogeneous shear flow may vigorously respond to the intense flow structures induced by the mean shear. In this study, by direct numerical simulation (DNS) of particle-laden shear flow, we observe the statistical properties of those accelerations, and then we assessed the recently proposed simulation approach in which the effect of intermittency on residual scales is linked directly with coarsely resolved flow turbulence. First, we focused on the acceleration statistics of fluid particles in a homogeneous shear flow. Consistent with previous findings in homogenous isotropic turbulence, the norm and the direction of fluid acceleration in shear flow are shown to be conditioned by the dynamics of intermittent long-lived vortical structures. The averaged acceleration norm of the fluid particle exhibits a pseudo-cyclic behaviour, which is a signature of the periodic action of the largest confined vortices against the mean shear. The long correlation time of the acceleration norm, of the order of the integral time, the high level of fluctuations of the acceleration norm (very close to the magnitude of the mean norm of acceleration) and the log-normality in its statistical distribution reflect the impact of intense flow structures in shear flow. The presence of these zones results also in highly non-Gaussian statistics of the acceleration of a fluid particle and its velocity increments at small time lags. Contrary to the acceleration norm, the acceleration direction of a fluid particle is observed to be short, of the order of the Kolmogorov time, and to be statistically independent of the acceleration norm. The short-time correlation of the acceleration direction is attributed usually to effects of centripetal forces in intense vorticity filaments. We suggest that, in homogeneous shear turbulence, there may be a supplementary effect on the acceleration direction: the vortex, stretched by the mean shear, may exert the preferential direction of fluid particle acceleration. As evidence, our DNS shows that fluid particles are accelerated preferentially in the direction of longitudinal vortical tubes, effectively stretched by the imposed mean shear. Concerning simulations with heavy point-wise particles, it is shown that, when the inertia of a particle is not high, its acceleration closely follows all the aforementioned properties of the fluid particle acceleration. Particularly, an inertial particle is also entrained by accelerating motion in the direction of the effectively stretched vortical tubes. Although with increasing Stokes number of the inertial particle, the effects of strong intermittency in the flow are filtered, it is shown that the alignment of the particle acceleration direction with vortical tubes is amplified – particles with higher inertia respond to solicitations of stronger vortical structures. An alternative to the Maxey (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 174, 1987, pp. 441–465) preferential sweeping mechanism is discussed in this paper. When the shear turbulence is under-resolved, we employed the large-eddy simulation (LES) equations with a forcing term on the smallest resolved scales in order to simulate stochastically the effects of the dynamics on the residual scales. The forcing term is expressed with two independent stochastic processes, one for its norm and another for its direction. While the norm of acceleration is modelled using Pope’s log-normal process with the integral time for correlation, its direction is modelled in the framework of an Ornstein–Uhlenbeck process on the unit sphere. Consistently with our DNS, the latter process contains two presumed times: the homogeneous strain rate is specified as typical time of relaxation towards the direction of resolved vorticity, and the Kolmogorov time is presumed as a typical time of the diffusion process on the unit sphere. The high efficiency of this approach is demonstrated in prediction of the small-scale dynamics observed in DNS, even in the case when the shear length scale is not resolved by LES.