Many natural and industrial processes involve the flow of solid particles or liquid droplets suspended in turbulent flows. In this talk, we focus on the challenges involved in simulating turbulent particle-laden flows and propose new subgrid-scale (SGS) models for dilute and dense particulate suspensions. By treating the drag force as an Ornstein-Uhlenbeck process, we present models that can capture the effect of particle microstructure on velocity statistics.
It will also be shown that embedding two-point pairwise interactions in the stochastic process enables spatial correlation between particles, resulting in the first SGS model to reproduce both one-point fluid and two-point particle statistics. This has important consequences for predicting particle dispersion and deposition in a broad class of environmental flows.
Jesse Capecelatro is an associate professor in the Departments of Mechanical Engineering and Aerospace Engineering at the University of Michigan. He received a Ph.D. from Cornell University in 2014 followed by a postdoc at the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign. His research is broadly under the realm of fluid mechanics, with an emphasis on multiphase flow, turbulence, and scientific computing.