Drag and lift forces on random assemblies of wall-attached spheres in low-Reynolds-number shear flow

Direct numerical simulations of the shear flow over assemblies of uniformly sized, solid spheres attached to a flat wall have been performed using the lattice-Boltzmann method. The random sphere assemblies comprised monolayers, double layers and triple layers. The Reynolds number based on the sphere radius and the overall shear rate was much smaller than 1. The results were interpreted in terms of the drag force (the force in the streamwise direction) and lift force (the force in the wall-normal direction) experienced by the spheres as a function of the denseness of the bed and the depth of the spheres in the bed. The average drag and lift forces decay monotonically as a function of the surface coverage of the spheres in the top layer of the bed. The sphere-to-sphere variation of the drag and lift forces is significant due to interactions between spheres via the interstitial fluid flow.