An Adaptive Particle Tracking Algorithm for Lagrangian-Eulerian Simulations of Dispersed Multiphase Flows

Abstract

The Lagrangian-Eulerian method is broadly used for simulations of dispersed multiphase flows by solving the continuous phase in the Eulerian framework while treating the dispersed phase as point particles in a Lagrangian framework. The accuracy of the Lagrangian-Eulerian method largely depends on the number of computational particles tracked for the Lagrangian phase. In this study, an adaptive Lagrangian particle tracking algorithm is proposed to balance the statistical error and the computational cost by dividing and merging the particles according to the local particle statistics in the computational domain. The computational particles are considered as weighted sampling points of the particle probability density functions (PDF) which represents a statistical equivalence of the Lagrangian phase. The algorithm is implemented as a part of a C++ library for Lagrangian particles, Grit, with performance portability to multi-core or many-core CPUs and Graphic Processing Unit (GPU) architectures. The accuracy of the proposed algorithm with two different schemes are studied through a test problem with analytical solutions for both the particle number density and momentum source term. The results are used to evaluate the proposed algorithm as well as to validate the parallel implementation.