Particle-laden turbulent flows find applications in many industrial processes like pneumatic transport of powders, coal combustion, fluidized bed reactors etc. Turbulence plays important role in both the distribution and de-mixing/segregation of the particles.  Depending on the intensity of the turbulence and particle inertia, higher particle concentration may happen near the wall region of the  flow geometry which may cause higher rate of particle deposition at the wall. A proper understanding will lead to the assessment of deposition behavior and the transport coefficients in the above mentioned processes. In the proposed project we plan to conduct experiments and simulations to predict dynamics of both the phases simultaneously. Simulation will be performed based on fluid-particle coupled model (two way coupling) such as large eddy simulation (LES) for fluid phase with discrete element model (DEM) for particle phase. Experiments using particle image velocimetry (PIV) will be conducted and compared with simulation results.
 

The proposed research deals with the theoretical and experimental investigation of the dynamics of inertial suspension in microchannel. Even though the flow Reynolds number is low, during its motion in confined channel the constituent particle of suspension experiences  inertial lift force, which in turn produces particle migration. Such migration behavior of the particle can be utilized to develop filter-less separation technology based on particle shape and size. Here we plan to apply fully resolved lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) to  numerically simulate the dynamics of particle and fluid flow behavior for spherical and nonspherical. Experiments will be conducted using in-house-developed micro-PIV technique to validate the theoretical results.

The fluidized/spouted bed technology is widely applied in pharmaceutical, chemical and petrochemical industries. Such technology can be applied for coating, surface modification of the particles using chemical vapor deposition (CVD). To control the deposition process a  detail understanding of simultaneous hydrodynamics of gas-solid phases, reaction kinetics, and mass transport processes are required. Therefore it is required to develop a composite model to address hydrodynamics and local kinetics to address the overall coating process on the particle.