Orientation, distribution, and deposition of elongated, inertial fibers in turbulent channel flow

In this paper, the dispersion of rigid, highly elongated fibers in a turbulent channel flow is investigated. Fibers are treated as prolate ellipsoidal particles which move according to their inertia and to hydrodynamic drag and rotate according to hydrodynamic torques. The orientational behavior of fibers is examined together with their preferential distribution, near-wall accumulation, and wall deposition: all these phenomena are interpreted in connection with turbulence dynamics near the wall. In this work a wide range of fiber classes, characterized by different elongation (quantified by the fiber aspect ratio, λ) and different inertia (quantified by a suitably defined fiber response time, τp) is considered. A parametric study in the (λ,τp)-space confirms that, in the vicinity of the wall, fibers tend to align with the mean streamwise flow direction. However, this aligned configuration is unstable, particularly for higher inertia of the fiber, and can be maintained for rather short times before fibers ...