Forces on a spherical particle in shear flow at intermediate Reynolds numbers

When particles are submerged in a shear flow, there are lateral (lift) forces on the particles, and these lateral forces affect the dispersion of the particles very much. Recent literature survey indicates that there are large discrepancies among the results from the previous numerical investigations on this subject. A small computational domain ranging between 20-30 sphere radii was used in all the previous numerical investigations. However, the result from the present study reveals that the value of lift coefficient strongly depends on the size of computational domain. To provide correct numerical data and physical interpretation for the forces on a spherical particle in linear shear flow, accurate numerical computations were performed for 5 <= Re <= 200 using a computational domain of 101 sphere radii.