Shock wave interaction with spherical particles: a particle-resolved numerical study of collective effects

• Applicant: Professor Dr. Markus Uhlmann
• Subject Area: Fluid Mechanics
• Term: from 2020 to 2024
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 420325084

The interaction between shock waves and solid particles is at the core of a number of technologically relevant processes such as cold gas spray coating and shock-based drug delivery. At the same time fundamental questions related to the basic particulate flow problem are still poorly understood. For example, due to lack of high-quality data it is not clear whether collective effects (sheltering) lead to pattern formation and how this feeds back upon the global flow evolution. As a consequence, engineering-type models are not yet capable of faithfully reproducing the relevant features of shocked fluid-particle systems. In this project we are aiming to fill a gap in the current state of the art by performing particle-resolved numerical simulation of planar shock waves sweeping over a curtain of thousands of freely-mobile spherical particles. For this purpose we will use an immersed boundary method for compressible flow, allowing the use of a simple fixed grid. The large-scale simulations will mainly focus on the inviscid (Euler) equations, with additional Navier-Stokes runs in order to gauge the importance of viscous effects at later times. The high-fidelity data-sets will enable us to analyze the statistics and structural features of the particle motion as well as the interstitial fluid flow in order to advance our understanding of the mechanisms behind collective effects in such systems. This study will further pave the way for improved reduced-order modeling, in particular in the framework of the Eulerian-Lagrangian point-particle approach.

• DFG Programme: Research Grants