Large Eddy Simulation of a Planar Jet Flow with Nanoparticle Coagulation

Coagulation and growth of nanoparticles subject to large coherent structures in a planar jet has been explored by using large eddy simulation. The particle field is obtained by employing a moment method to approximate the nanoparticle general dynamic equation. An incompressible fluid containing particles of 1 nm in diameter is projected into a particle-free ambient. The results show that the coherent structures dominate the evolution of the nanoparticle number intensity diameter and polydispersity distributions as the jet develops. In addition, the coherent structures act to increase the diffusion of particles, and the vortex rolling-up makes the particles distributing more irregularly while the vortex pairing causes particle distributions to become uniform. As the jet travels downstream, the time-averaged particle number concentration becomes lower in the jet core and higher in the outskirts, whereas the time-averaged particle mass over the entire flow field maintains unaltered, and the time-averaged particle diameter and geometric standard deviations grow and reach their maximum on the interface of the jet region and the ambient.The project was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China (10372090) and the Doctoral Program of Higher Education of China (20030335001).The English text was polished by Yunming Chen.