Particle-Gas Interactions using FLASH

For a small side project during my Ph.D., I got an opportunity to work on the FLASH solver, which is an open-source, scalable simulation tool for modeling compressible flow problems in astrophysical environments. The goal was to modify the particle module in FLASH for modeling particle lifting mechanisms due to gas-particle interactions, as well as plasma-particle interactions. I made a small contribution to the first part, while working with Akhil Marayikkottu, who led the project to completion and published a paper (Marayikkottu et al., 2021). As a validation, I modeled particle lifting when a normal shock passes over a particle. As shown in 1(b), the result compares well with experiments.

Fig. 1.(a) An instance of shock tube simulation showing important flow features and the trajectory of a lifted particle. (b) Comparison of particle trajectory with numerical results of Gosteev & Fedorov (2003) and experiments of Merzkirch & Bracht (1978).

References

2021

Study of particle lifting mechanisms in an electrostatic discharge plasma

Akhil V. Marayikkottu , Saurabh S. Sawant , Deborah A. Levin , and 3 more authors

International Journal of Multiphase Flow, Oct 2021

Bib HTML

@article{marayikkottu_2021,
  title = {Study of particle lifting mechanisms in an electrostatic discharge plasma},
  author = {Marayikkottu, Akhil V. and Sawant, Saurabh S. and Levin, Deborah A. and Huang, Ci and Schoenitz, Mirko and Dreizin, Edward L.},
  journal = {International Journal of Multiphase Flow},
  volume = {137},
  pages = {103564},
  year = {2021},
  issn = {0301-9322},
  doi = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmultiphaseflow.2021.103564},
  url = {https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijmultiphaseflow.2021.103564},
}