Numerical study of particle-vortex interaction and turbulence modulation in swirling jets

This study carried out a direct numerical simulation of gas-solid swirling jet flow, focusing on the particle-vortex interaction and mechanisms of turbulence modulation. Two cases of flows with either a constant particle flow rate or a constant particle mass loading are simulated. The typical instantaneous particle-vortex interactions are illustrated and analyzed, as well as the spectrum representations and the projections of them. The results show that the small particles (St<1) and light-mass loadings augment the vortices of the large-scale range in the power spectrum representation by shifting the peaks of wave numbers from small to large values as they pass through the large vortices and break them into smaller scales. The large particles and heavy-mass loadings suppress greatly the large scales of vortices, transferring the turbulent kinetic energy from large to relatively smaller scales of vortices, resulting in turbulence augmentation in the large wave numbers and turbulence attenuation in the range of small wave numbers. Moreover, by comparison between the two cases, it is found that the turbulence modulation is more highly sensitive to the effect of mass loadings rather than the dynamical response property of particles. The well-known knowledge on modulation of turbulence is true under the condition of the same mass loading. However, the situation becomes very complicated when the mass loading changes. Finally, these conclusions are verified by the analysis of energy spectrum and dissipation.