The effect of wall-normal gravity on particle-laden near-wall turbulence

We performed two-way coupled direct numerical simulations of turbulent channel flow with Lagrangian tracking of small, heavy spheres at a dimensionless gravitational acceleration of 0.077 in wall units, which is based on the flow condition in the experiment by Gerashchenko et al. (J. Fluid Mech., vol. 617, 2008, pp. 255-281). We removed deposited particles after several collisions with the lower wall and then released new particles near the upper wall to observe direct interactions between particles and coherent structures of near-wall turbulence during gravitational settling through the mean shear. The results indicate that when the Stokes number is approximately 1 on the basis of the Kolmogorov time scale of the flow (), the so-called preferential sweeping occurs in association with coherent streamwise vortices, while the effect of crossing trajectories becomes significant for 1$]]>. Consequently, in either case, the settling particles deposit on the wall without strong accumulation in low-speed streaks in the viscous sublayer. When particles settle through near-wall turbulence from the upper wall, more small-scale vortical structures are generated in the outer layer as low-speed fluid is pulled farther in the direction of gravity, while the opposite is true near the lower wall.