Reynolds number scaling of inertial particle statistics in turbulent channel flows

Abstract The effect of the Reynolds number on the behaviour of inertial particles in wall-bounded turbulent flows is investigated through large-scale direct numerical simulations (DNS) of particle-laden canonical channel flow spanning almost a decade in the friction Reynolds number, from $\def \xmlpi #1{}\def \mathsfbi #1{\boldsymbol {\mathsf {#1}}}\let \le =\leqslant \let \leq =\leqslant \let \ge =\geqslant \let \geq =\geqslant \def \Pr {\mathit {Pr}}\def \Fr {\mathit {Fr}}\def \Rey {\mathit {Re}}\mathit{Re}_{\tau } = 150$ to $\mathit{Re}_{\tau } = 1000$ . Lagrangian particle tracking is used to study the motion of six different particle sets, described by a Stokes number in the range $\mathit{St} = 1\text {--}1000$ . At all Reynolds numbers a strong segregation in the near-wall region is observed for particles characterized by intermediate Stokes number, in the range $\mathit{St} =10\text {--}100$ . The wall-normal concentration profiles of such particles collapse in inner scaling, thus suggesting the independence of the turbophoretic drift from the large-scale outer motions. This observation is also supported by the spatial organization of the suspended phase in the inner layer, which is found to be universal with the Reynolds number. The deposition rate coefficient increases with $\mathit{Re}_{\tau }$ for a given $\mathit{St}$ . Suitable inner and outer scalings are proposed to collapse the deposition curves across the available ranges of Reynolds and Stokes numbers for the different deposition regimes.