Numerical solution scheme for inert, disperse, and dilute gas-particle flows

A multi-velocity formulation is proposed for the solution of an Eulerian representation of an inert, disperse, and dilute particle-phase of a gas-particle flow. Single-velocity formulations are capable of predicting regions of zero particle concentration but are problematic with crossing particle trajectories or compression waves. The multi-velocity formulation described here can account for crossing particle trajectories by splitting the particle-phase into distinct velocity families which are transported separately in the flow. Switching of the particle families at solid boundaries and due to momentum transfer with the gas-phase is conducted in a manner that enforces conservation of mass, momentum, and energy. This numerical method is combined with a parallel block-based adaptive mesh refinement algorithm that is very effective in treating problems with disparate length scales. The block-based data structure lends itself naturally to domain decomposition and thereby enables efficient and scalable implementations of the algorithm on distributed-memory multi-processor architectures. Numerical results are described to demonstrate the capabilities of the approach for predicting gas-particle flows.