Towards efficient tracking of inertial particles with high-order multidomain methods

  • Authors:

  • G. B. Jacobs;D. A. Kopriva;F. Mashayek

  • Affiliations:

  • Department of Aerospace Engineering and Engineering Mechanics, San Diego State University, San Diego, CA 92182, USA;Department of Mathematics, The Florida State University, Tallahassee, FL 32306, USA;Department of Mechanical and Industrial Engineering, University of Illinois at Chicago, Chicago, IL 60607, USA

  • Venue:
  • Journal of Computational and Applied Mathematics
  • Year:
  • 2007

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Abstract

This paper develops an efficient particle tracking algorithm to be used in fluid simulations approximated by a high-order multidomain discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations. We discuss how to locate a particle's host subdomain, how to interpolate the flow field to its location, and how to integrate its motion in time. A search algorithm for the nearest subdomain and quadrature point, tuned to a typical quadrilateral isoparametric spectral subdomain, takes advantage of the inverse of the linear blending equation. We show that to compute particle-laden flows, a sixth-order Lagrangian polynomial that uses points solely within a subdomain is sufficiently accurate to interpolate the carrier phase variables to the particle position. Time integration of particles with a lower-order Adams-Bashforth scheme, rather than the fourth-order Runge-Kutta scheme often used for the integration of the carrier phase, increases computational efficiency while maintaining engineering accuracy. We verify the tracking algorithm with numerical tests on a steady channel flow and an unsteady backward-facing step flow.