On the settling and clustering behaviour of polydisperse gas–solid flows

Sedimenting flows occur in a range of society-critical systems, such as circulating fluidised bed reactors and pyroclastic density currents (PDCs), the most hazardous volcanic process. In these systems, mass loading is sufficiently high ( $\gg \mathcal {O}(1)$ ) and momentum coupling between the phases gives rise to mesoscale behaviour, such as formation of coherent structures capable of generating and sustaining turbulence in the carrier phase and directly impacting large-scale quantities of interest, such as settling time. While contemporary work has explored the physical processes underpinning these multiphase phenomena for monodispersed particles, polydispersed behaviour has been largely understudied. Since all real-world flows are polydisperse, understanding the role of polydispersity in gas–solid systems is critical for informing closures that are accurate and robust. This work characterises the sedimentation behaviour of two polydispersed gas–solid flows, with properties of the particles sampled from historical PDC ejecta. Highly resolved data at two volume fractions (1 % and 10 %) are collected using an EulerLagrange framework and is compared with monodisperse configurations of particles with diameters equivalent to the arithmetic mean of the polydisperse configurations. From these data, we find that polydispersity has an important impact on cluster formation and structure and that this is most pronounced for dilute flows. At higher volume fraction, the effect of polydispersity is reduced. We also propose a new metric for predicting the degree of clustering, termed ‘surface loading’, and a model for the coefficient of drag that accurately captures the settling velocity observed in the high-fidelity data.