Abstract Solid-liquid suspension flows are widely encountered in industrial applications. In many of these flows, the carrier fluid exhibits shear-thinning behaviour and the solids have a broad size distribution. Shear-thinning suspensions can occur in laminar or weakly turbulent regimes due to their high viscosity. This paper presents a DNS-DEM model for weakly turbulent coarse-particle suspension flows. Although our interest is in shear-thinning suspensions, we aim firstly to develop a liquid-solid model in a Newtonian fluid to remove the uncertainty in particle-fluid interaction in non-Newtonian suspensions. Matching experiments were conducted for validation. The predicted mixture velocity and concentration profiles are in good agreement with experiments, and discrepancies are mostly less than 10%. The mean velocity profiles are significantly damped by coarse particles and particle phase generally exhibits a higher fluctuation. This DNS-DEM modelling approach is viable for simulating these flows and will form the basis of future work on shear-thinning suspension flow.

中文翻译：

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湍流粗颗粒悬浮流：测量和建模

摘要 固液悬浮流动在工业应用中广泛存在。在许多这样的流动中，载液表现出剪切稀化行为，固体具有广泛的尺寸分布。由于其高粘度，剪切稀化悬浮液可以在层流或弱湍流状态下发生。本文提出了弱湍流粗颗粒悬浮流的 DNS-DEM 模型。尽管我们的兴趣是剪切稀化悬浮液，但我们的目标首先是在牛顿流体中开发液-固模型，以消除非牛顿悬浮液中颗粒-流体相互作用的不确定性。进行匹配实验以进行验证。预测的混合速度和浓度分布与实验非常吻合，差异大多小于 10%。平均速度分布受到粗颗粒的显着阻尼，颗粒相通常表现出更高的波动。这种 DNS-DEM 建模方法对于模拟这些流动是可行的，并将构成未来剪切稀化悬浮液流动工作的基础。