Fully resolved simulations of thermal convective suspensions of elliptic particles using a multigrid fictitious boundary method

•Natural thermal convection induces fluid motion.•Particle shape-effects do play an important role in the particle and overall system dynamics.•Thermal heat exchange significantly affects the motion of the two-phase flow.•Multi-grid FEM-FBM is robust and potentially powerful tool for real particulate flow simulations. In particulate flows, particle-particle collisions play a very important role in determining the flow behavior of the fluid-particle two-phase systems. Thus, it is very important in the numerical simulations of particulate flows to treat the particle-particle interactions with a felicitous method. In this paper, a recently developed direct numerical simulation (DNS) technique, the Finite Element Fictitious Boundary Method (FEM-FBM), for thermal convective particulate flows is used for the simulations of dense particulate suspensions of elliptic shaped particles. The momentum and temperature flow fields are coupled with the aid of Boussinesq approximation. The thermal and momentum interactions between solid and fluid phases are handled by using the Fictitious boundary method (FBM). The continuity, momentum, and energy equations are solved on a fixed Eulerian mesh which is independent of flow features by using a multi-grid finite element scheme. A modified collision model is proposed that can handle not only the interactions between the circular particles but also effectively treat the collisions between the elliptic shaped particles. Firstly, we validate the newly developed collision model for isothermal circular particles together with a comparative study of “drafting, kissing and tumbling” (DKT) motion of both elliptic and circular shaped isothermal particles. Then we investigated the DKT motions of the hot and cold elliptic particles with energy exchange and studied the lateral behavior of the particles in numerous settings. Further, we studied the DKT motion of catalyst particles and investigate the particles behavior at different Grashof numbers. Numerical tests are performed to show that the present method is robust and provides an efficient approach for the simulations of particulate flows with a large number of elliptic particles.