Modeling and analysis of large-eddy simulations of particle-laden turbulent boundary layer flows

We describe a framework for the large-eddy simulation of solid particles suspended and transported within an incompressible turbulent boundary layer (TBL). For the fluid phase, the large-eddy simulation (LES) of incompressible turbulent boundary layer employs stretched spiral vortex subgrid-scale model and a virtual wall model similar to the work of Cheng, Pullin & Samtaney (J. Fluid Mech., 2015). This LES model is virtually parameter free and involves no active filtering of the computed velocity field. Furthermore, a recycling method to generate turbulent inflow is implemented. For the particle phase, the direct quadrature method of moments (DQMOM) is chosen in which the weights and abscissas of the quadrature approximation are tracked directly rather than the moments themselves. The numerical method in this framework is based on a fractional-step method with an energy-conservative fourth-order finite difference scheme on a staggered mesh. This code is parallelized based on standard message passing interface (MPI) protocol and is designed for distributed-memory machines. It is proposed to utilize this framework to examine transport of particles in very large-scale simulations. The solver is validated using the well know result of Taylor-Green vortex case. A large-scale sandstorm case is simulated and the altitude variations of number density along with its fluctuations are quantified.