Kinetic modeling of fractal aggregate mobility

Abstract

Although the mobility or transport parameters, such as lift drag and pitching moments for regular-shaped particulates, are widely studied, the mobility of irregular fractal-like aggregates generated by the aggregation of monomers is not well understood. These particulates which are ubiquitous in nature, and industries have very different transport mechanisms as compared to their spherical counterpart. A high-fidelity direct simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) study of two fractal aggregates of different shapes or dimensions is undertaken in the slip and transitional gas regime to understand the underlying mechanism of gas-particle momentum transfer that manifests as the orientation-averaged mobility parameters of the particulates. The study specifically focuses on the viscous contribution of these parameters and develops a non-linear correlation for drag and lift parameters p and q obtained from DSMC by normalizing the axial and lateral forces. The drag parameter p predicted a monotonic increase in fractal particulate drag with respect to a spherical monomer while the lift parameter q shows an initial increasing trend but a decreasing tendency toward the high Mach number or high compressibility regime. The approximate model that captures the compressibility and rarefaction effects of the fractal mobility is used to study the evolution of these particulates in a canonical Rankine vortex to illustrate the wide disparity in the trajectories of the fractal aggregate vs a spherical geometry approximation generally found in the literature.