Turbophoresis attenuation in a turbulent channel flow with polymer additives

Turbophoresis occurs in wall-bounded turbulent flows where it induces a preferential accumulation of inertial particles towards the wall and is related to the spatial gradients of the turbulent velocity fluctuations. In this work, we address the effects of drag-reducing polymer additives on turbophoresis in a channel flow. The analysis is based on data from a direct numerical simulation of the turbulent flow of a viscoelastic fluid modelled with the FENE-P closure and laden with particles of different inertia. We show that polymer additives decrease the particle preferential wall accumulation and demonstrate with an analytical model that the turbophoretic drift is reduced because the wall-normal variation of the wall-normal fluid velocity fluctuations decreases. As this is a typical feature of drag reduction in turbulent flows, an attenuation of turbophoresis and a corresponding increase in the particle streamwise flux are expected to be observed in all of these flows, e. g. fibre or bubble suspensions and magnetohydrodynamics.