Attenuation of turbulence in a periodic cube by anisotropic solid particles

We conduct direct numerical simulations (DNS) to investigate the attenuation of turbulence in a periodic cube due to the addition of prolate spheroidal solid particles. Even with a dilute volume fraction of $O(10^{-2})$ , particles can drastically attenuate the turbulence. Our DNS show that the turbulent kinetic energy reduces more significantly when the particles’ Stokes number is larger, size is smaller or aspect ratio is larger. We can explain these results based on the formula proposed by Oka and Goto (2022 J. Fluid Mech. 949 , A45), which relates the turbulence attenuation rate to the energy dissipation rate $\epsilon _p$ around particles. More precisely, under the condition that the volume fraction of particles is fixed, $\epsilon _p$ is larger when the Stokes number and, therefore, the relative velocity between fluid and particles are larger, the particle size is smaller or the aspect ratio is larger. These results also imply that the rotation of the anisotropic particles plays only a limited role in the attenuation of turbulence when the Stokes number of particles is sufficiently large, because the main cause of the attenuation is the relative translational velocity between fluid and particles.