Quantification of Particle and Fluid Scales in Particle-Laden Turbulent Channel Flow

In this work, we study the dispersion of inertial particles in fully-developed turbulent channel flow to evaluate the relationship between particle and fluid time scales, and to identify suitable scales for parametrization of near-wall particle behavior. Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) and Lagrangian particle tracking are used to build a complete and homogeneous dataset which covers a large target parameter space and includes statistics of particle velocity and particle concentration at steady state. Our results show that the Lagrangian integral time scale of the fluid is adequate to characterize particle wall deposition and that such fluid time scale will be different when sampled at the position of either fluid particles or inertial particles. Differences become particularly evident in the range 5 < St < 25. These observations can be crucial to improve the accuracy of engineering models for particle deposition.