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Decomposition of the drag force in steady and oscillatory flow through a hexagonal sphere pack

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  09 November 2023

Lukas Unglehrt*
Affiliation:
Professorship of Hydromechanics, Technical University of Munich, Arcisstr. 21, 80333 Munich, Germany
Michael Manhart
Affiliation:
Professorship of Hydromechanics, Technical University of Munich, Arcisstr. 21, 80333 Munich, Germany
*
†Email address for correspondence: lukas.unglehrt@tum.de

Abstract

We investigate steady and oscillatory flow through a hexagonal close-packed arrangement of spheres in the framework of the volume-averaged momentum equation. We quantify the friction and pressure drag based on a direct numerical simulation dataset. Using the pressure decomposition of Graham (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 881, 2019), the pressure drag can be further split up into an accelerative, a viscous and a convective contribution. For the accelerative pressure, a closed-form expression can be given in terms of the potential flow solution. We investigate the contributions of the different drag components to the volume-averaged momentum budget and their Reynolds number scaling. For steady flow, we find that the friction and viscous pressure drag are proportional to $Re$ at low Reynolds numbers and scale with $Re^{1.4}$ for high Reynolds numbers. This is close to the steady laminar boundary layer scaling. For the convective pressure drag, we find a cubic scaling at low and a quadratic scaling at high Reynolds numbers. The Reynolds stresses have a minor contribution to the momentum budget. For oscillatory flow at low and medium Womersley numbers, the amplitudes of the drag components are similar to the steady cases at the same Reynolds number. At high Womersley numbers, the drag components behave quite differently and the friction and viscous pressure drag are relatively insignificant. The drag components are not in phase with the forcing and the superficial velocity; the phase lag increases with the Womersley number. This suggests that new models beyond the current quasisteady approaches need to be developed.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BYCreative Common License - SA
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution-ShareAlike licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0), which permits re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the same Creative Commons licence is used to distribute the re-used or adapted article and the original article is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2023. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Figure 1. Conceptual sketch of the volume approach for the hexagonal sphere pack. (a) The sphere pack consists of triply periodic unit cells. The periodic flow $\boldsymbol {u}$, $p$ inside the unit cell is driven by the macroscopic pressure gradient $\boldsymbol {f}$. (b) The simulation domain of the hexagonal sphere pack consists of four primitive unit cells (one of which is highlighted in yellow).

Figure 1

Figure 2. Drag coefficient in steady flow through a hexagonal sphere pack together with Darcy's law, the correction of Mei & Auriault (1991) and the modified Ergun equation (Macdonald et al.1979).

Figure 2

Figure 3. Comparison of the relation between the instantaneous drag force and the superficial velocity for steady and oscillatory flow: (a) LF5 ($Re=158, Wo=10$); (b) MF5 ($Re=157, Wo=31.62$).

Figure 3

Figure 4. Illustration of the effect of the pressure component $p^{(a)}$. (a) External force field $\boldsymbol {f}$. (b) Projected force field $\boldsymbol {f}-\boldsymbol {\nabla } p^{(a)}$ (blue) and $-\boldsymbol {\nabla } p^{(a)}$ (red).

Figure 4

Figure 5. Auxiliary potential $\varPhi _x$ in the hexagonal sphere pack (a) in a three-dimensional view and (b) in the plane $\sqrt {3}/3\, y-\sqrt {6}/3\,z = 0$ with the mirror planes $x=0$, $x=d/2$ and $x=d$ of the hexagonal sphere pack. The auxiliary potential $\varPhi _x$ is antisymmetric with respect to these mirror planes. The colours range from $-0.15\,d$ (blue) to $0.15\,d$ (red).

Figure 5

Table 1. Simulation parameters of the steady cases and root mean square of the pressure drag decomposition residual. The simulations marked with ${\dagger}$ were recomputed at a finer grid resolution compared with Sakai & Manhart (2020). The value $N_{samples}$ denotes the number of snapshots that were collected during the averaging time $T_{avg}$. The residual $r=f_{px}-f_{px}^{(a)}-f_{px}^{(v)}-f_{px}^{(c)}$ of the pressure drag decomposition was computed for each snapshot.

Figure 6

Table 2. Simulation parameters of the oscillatory cases and root mean square of the pressure drag decomposition residual. The simulations marked with ${\dagger}$ were taken from Unglehrt & Manhart (2022a). The residual $r=f_{px}-f_{px}^{(a)}-f_{px}^{(v)}-f_{px}^{(c)}$ of the pressure drag decomposition was computed for each snapshot.

Figure 7

Figure 6. Parameter space for the hexagonal sphere pack. The blue crosses represent the steady simulations in Sakai & Manhart (2020) that correspond to the limit $Wo\to 0$. The open circles denote the simulations in Unglehrt & Manhart (2022a) of laminar oscillatory flow and the red filled circles represent simulations of transitional and turbulent oscillatory flow. The dashed line separates the linear regime on the left-hand side from the nonlinear regime on the right-hand side (Unglehrt & Manhart 2022a).

Figure 8

Figure 7. Mesh convergence of the auxiliary potential solution. We give the difference in the high-frequency limit of the dynamic tortuosity $\alpha _{\infty }$ and the length scale $\varLambda$ relative to their values at a resolution of 384 cpd.

Figure 9

Figure 8. Drag components in steady flow normalised with the imposed macroscopic pressure gradient $\epsilon f_x$.

Figure 10

Figure 9. Drag components in steady flow normalised with $\frac {1}{2}\rho \!\left \langle u \right \rangle _{s}^2/d$. The black lines represent different scalings with the Reynolds number: $1/Re$ (dotted), $1/\sqrt {Re}$ (dashed), $1$ (dash-dotted) and $Re$ (solid). The scaling line for $Re$ was anchored at the case L4, the scaling lines for $1/\sqrt {Re}$ were anchored at the case T4, and the scaling line for $1$ was set to the mean value of the cases UNL1–T2.

Figure 11

Figure 10. Drag components in linear flow normalised with the amplitude of the imposed macroscopic pressure gradient $\epsilon f_x$ for $Wo=10$ (LF1), $Wo=31.62$ (MF1) and $Wo=100$ (HF1).

Figure 12

Table 3. Relative amplitude and phase lag of the acceleration, the accelerative pressure drag, the friction drag and the viscous pressure drag with respect to to the macroscopic pressure gradient $\epsilon \,f_x\sin (\varOmega t)$ in linear flow. The limits $Wo\to 0$ and $Wo\to \infty$ correspond to Stokes flow (case L4) and potential flow, respectively. Note that the accelerative pressure drag $f_p^{(a)}$ always has a relative amplitude of $38.4\,\%$; the convective pressure drag $f_p^{(c)}$ is negligible in linear flow.

Figure 13

Figure 11. Convective pressure drag normalised with $\rho (\max \left \langle u \right \rangle _{s})^{3}/\nu$ corresponding to the scaling of Mei & Auriault (1991).

Figure 14

Figure 12. Drag components in nonlinear flow at $Wo=10$ normalised with the amplitude of the imposed macroscopic pressure gradient $\epsilon f_x$ for $Re=77$ (LF4), $Re=158$ (LF5) and $Re=306$ (LF6).

Figure 15

Figure 13. Drag components in nonlinear flow at $Wo=31.62$ normalised with the amplitude of the imposed macroscopic pressure gradient $\epsilon f_x$ for $Re=73$ (MF4), $Re=157$ (MF5) and $Re=297$ (MF6).

Figure 16

Figure 14. Drag components in nonlinear flow at $Wo=100$ normalised with the amplitude of the imposed macroscopic pressure gradient $\epsilon f_x$ for $Re=252$ (HF4) and $Re=468$ (HF5).

Figure 17

Figure 15. Friction drag normalised with $\rho \sqrt {\nu } (\max \left \langle u \right \rangle _{s})^{3/2}/d^{3/2}$ corresponding to a steady laminar boundary layer scaling.

Figure 18

Figure 16. Viscous pressure drag normalised with $\rho \sqrt {\nu } (\max \left \langle u \right \rangle _{s})^{3/2}/d^{3/2}$ corresponding to a steady laminar boundary layer scaling.

Figure 19

Figure 17. Convective pressure drag normalised with $\rho (\max \left \langle u \right \rangle _{s})^{2}/d$ corresponding to an inertial scaling.

Figure 20

Figure 18. Comparison of the relation between the instantaneous drag components and the superficial velocity for steady and oscillatory flow in the case MF5 ($Re=157$, $Wo=31.62$). (a) Sum of friction and viscous pressure drag; (b) convective pressure drag.

Figure 21

Figure 19. Instantaneous velocity magnitude $\vert \boldsymbol {u}\vert$ and $u=0$ contour of the case MF5 at the times marked in figure 13. The colours are normalised with respect to the instantaneous superficial velocity. (a) Beginning of the steep increase of the convective pressure drag ($\varphi =0.28{\rm \pi}, Re(t)=85$). (b) End of the steep increase of the convective pressure drag ($\varphi =0.52{\rm \pi}, Re(t)=157$).

Figure 22

Figure 20. (a) Orientation of the normal vector $\boldsymbol {n}$, the tangent vector $\boldsymbol {t}$ and their cross product $\boldsymbol {t}\times \boldsymbol {n}$ with respect to the surface patch $A$. The normal vector points from the fluid outside into the sphere. (b) Orientation of the normal vector $\boldsymbol {n}$, the wall shear stress $\boldsymbol {\tau }_{w}$ and the wall vorticity $\boldsymbol {\omega }_{w}$ with respect to the surface.

Figure 23

Table 4. Grid convergence of the velocity field $\boldsymbol {u}(\boldsymbol {x},t)$ in steady oscillation. The relative error in $\Vert \boldsymbol {u}\Vert _{L^2}^2$ is defined as $e_{res} = ( \Vert \boldsymbol {u}_{res}\Vert _{L^2}^2-\Vert \boldsymbol {u}_{384}\Vert _{L^2}^2 ) / \Vert \boldsymbol {u}_{384}\Vert _{L^2}^2$ and as $e_{res} = ( \Vert \boldsymbol {u}_{res}\Vert _{L^2}^2-\Vert \boldsymbol {u}_{768}\Vert _{L^2}^2 ) / \Vert \boldsymbol {u}_{768}\Vert _{L^2}^2$ for HF5. The Reynolds number $Re$ is defined according to (1.4).

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