The effect of forcing schemes on the statistical properties of two-phase turbulent flows

One of the simplest forms of a turbulent two-phase flow is drops/bubbles suspended within a homogeneous isotropic turbulent carrier phase. While the equilibrium state of the single-phase counterpart is very well understood, that of the two-phase system remains unexplored. This is due to a lack of knowledge on the effect of forcing schemes that maintain constant properties of the system, especially for systems with non-unity density ratios between the carrier and dispersed phases. Prior studies with non-unity density ratios report the statistics of the flow as the turbulence decays in time, where the statistics could be susceptible to the initial unphysical state of the system. In this talk, we present a controller-based forcing scheme capable of forcing one or both phases simultaneously, maintaining a constant individual-phase kinetic energy and the surface energy between the two phases. The effect of such a forcing, and its variants, on the statistical properties of each phase, such as the integral kinetic energy, Reynolds number, energy spectra, and bubble/droplet size distributions are explored as the physical properties such as the density ratio and Weber number, amongst others, are varied.