Settling tracer spheroids in vertical turbulent channel flows

The motion of particles settling in turbulence is an intriguing problem, which is relevant to an in-depth understanding of planktons in marine flows or the design of photobioreactors. This work studies the motion, orientation and distribution of inertia-less spheroidal particles settling in vertical channel flows by direct numerical simulations. We show that, compared to spherical tracers, the settling velocity of spheroidal tracers is enhanced due to preferential orientation and local clustering (not due to particle inertia, in the present case). Prolate spheroids tend to align their symmetry axes in the direction of gravity while oblate ones align perpendicular to it. Both kinds of particles attain a larger slip velocity in the direction of gravity and, therefore, settle faster. We also show that particles sample preferentially regions of high fluid velocity in downward flow and regions of low fluid velocity in upward flow. Such preferential sampling, which also contributes to the enhancement of settling, is the result of clustering. Besides, tracer particles are observed to accumulate in the channel center in downward flow and near the wall in upward flow: We show that tracer transport in the wall-normal direction is controlled by the particle- to-fluid slip velocity and by clustering. The slip velocity dominates the transport initially, but tracers increasingly cluster in regions with opposite flow direction as they accumulate either in the channel center or near the wall. Clustering appears to be associate with the coherent structures that characterize wall turbulence, and tracer distribution in the wall-normal direction is found to reach a steady state when the two qualitatively different mechanisms balance each other.