Particle laden turbulent flows occur in a variety of industrial applications. While the numerical simulation of such flows has seen significant advances in recent years, it still remains a challenging problem. Many studies investigated the rheology of dense suspensions in laminar flows as well as the dynamics of point-particles in turbulence. Here we will present results on the development of numerical algorithms, based on the lattice Boltzmann method, suitable for the study of suspensions of finite-size particles under turbulent flow conditions. The turbulent flow is modeled by the lattice Boltzmann method, and the interaction between particles and carrier fluid is modeled using the bounce-back rule. Direct contact and lubrication force models for particle-particle interactions and particle-wall interaction are taken into account to allow for a full four-way coupled interaction. The accuracy and robustness of the method is discussed by validating the velocity profile in turbulent pipe flow, the sedimentation velocity of spheres in duct flow and the resistance functions of approaching particles. Preliminary results from the turbulent pipe flow simulations with particles show that the angular and axial velocities of the particles are scattered around values of mean axial velocity and shear rate obtained from the Eulerian velocity field.

We study the deformation and dynamics of droplets in time-dependent flows using 3D numerical simulations of two immiscible fluids based on the lattice Boltzmann model (LBM). Analytical models are available in the literature, which assume the droplet shape to be an ellipsoid at all times (P.L. Maffettone, M. Minale, J. Non-Newton. Fluid Mech 78, 227 (1998); M. Minale, Rheol. Acta 47, 667 (2008)). Beyond the practical importance of using a mesoscale simulation to assess "ab initio" the robustness and limitations of such theoretical models, our simulations are also key to discuss-in controlled situations-some relevant phenomenology related to the interplay between the flow time scales and the droplet time scales regarding the "transparency" transition for high enough shear frequencies for an external oscillating flow. This work may be regarded as a step forward to discuss extensions towards a novel DNS approach, describing the mesoscale physics of small droplets subjected to a generic hydrodynamical strain field, possibly mimicking the effect of a realistic turbulent flow on dilute droplet suspensions.

Anisotropic particles are present in many natural and industrial flows. Here we perform direct numerical simulation (DNS) of turbulent pipe flows with dispersed finite-size prolate spheroids simulated by means of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM). We consider three different particle shapes: spheroidal (aspect ratio 2 and 3) and spherical. These three simulations are complemented with a reference simulation of a single-phase flow. For the sake of comparison, all simulations, laden or unladen have the same energy input. The flow geometry used is a straight pipe with length eight times its radius where the fluid is randomly seeded with 256 finite-size particles. The volume fraction of particles in the flow has been kept fixed at 0.48% by varying the major and minor axis of each particle such that their volume remains the same. We studied the effect of different particle shapes on particle dynamics and orientation, as well as on the flow modulation. We show that the local accumulation of spheres close to the wall decreases for spheroids with increasing aspect ratio. These spheroidal particles rotate slower than spheres near to the wall and tend to stay with their major axes aligned to the flow streamwise direction. Despite the lower rotation rates, a higher intermittency in the rotational rates was observed for spheroids and this increase at increasing the aspect ratio. The drag reduction observed for particles with higher aspect ratio have also been investigated using the one-dimensional energy and dissipation spectra. These results point to the relevance of particle shapes on their dynamics and their influence on the turbulent flow.

We study the effects of thermally induced capillary waves in the fragmentation of a liquid ligament into multiple nanodroplets. Our numerical implementation is based on a fluctuating lattice Boltzmann (LB) model for nonideal multicomponent fluids, including nonequilibrium stochastic fluxes mimicking the effects of molecular forces at the nano scales. We quantitatively analyze the statistical distribution of the breakup times and the droplet volumes after the fragmentation process at changing the two relevant length scales of the problem, i.e., the thermal length scale and the ligament size. The robustness of the observed findings is also corroborated by quantitative comparisons with the predictions of sharp interface hydrodynamics. Beyond the practical importance of our findings for nanofluidic engineering devices, our study also explores a novel application of LB in the realm of nanofluidic phenomena.

We present the results of a comparative study performed with three numerical methods applied to a flow in a three-dimensional geometry characterized by weak compressibility and large rarefaction effects. The employed methods, all based on the kinetic theory of gases, are the Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) in a regularized formulation, the Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) approach and a hybrid method coupling the LBM and the DSMC recently developed by Di Staso et al., in this contribution extended to the case of simulations involving many particles and three-dimensional geometries. Owing to the common kinetic nature shared by the employed methods and to their implementation in a single code infrastructure, a detailed comparison of the results can be performed on a quantitative ground. The numerical results permit to determine, for the studied flow problem, the range of applicability in terms of a geometry-based Knudsen number for the present LBM formulation. The need to employ the hybrid method is justified by the very large computational cost of the DSMC simulation. Limitations of the current hybrid method formulation in treating thermal and large compressibility effects are underlined and possible strategies to overcome them are delineated. Finally, good scalability properties of the parallel algorithms, as well as the large computational cost reduction guaranteed by the hybrid method, while providing an accurate solution, are demonstrated. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

The alpha-quartz polymorph of SiO2 forms the basis of mineral sands stable down to 100 km depths below the surface, making it of central geoscientific relevance. The characterization of the nanoscale properties of these materials is of importance, especially for elastic properties governing phonon and sound propagation, and is of very high industrial relevance for oil exploration. Here, for the first time, we apply non-equilibrium molecular dynamics simulation to analyze the propagation of an artificial velocity perturbation in silica systems and, in so doing, determine S- and P-wave velocities in a manner redolent of concept to seismic-based oil-exploration approaches. This propagation has been analyzed systematically by means of different metrics in terms of spatiotemporal system response; these produce consistent results, by and large. In particular, we find excellent quantitative agreement with experimental S- and P-wave velocities, in many cases.

Three-dimensional, time-dependent direct simulations of step emulsification microdevices highlight two essential mechanisms for droplet formation: first, the onset of an adverse pressure gradient driving a backflow of the continuous phase from the external reservoir to the microchannel, and second, the stnction of the flowing jet which leads to its subsequent rupture. It is also shown that such a rupture is delayed and eventually suppressed by increasing the flow speed of the dispersed phase within the channel, due to the stabilizing effect of dynamic pressure. This suggests a new criterion for dripping-jetting transition, based on local values of the capillary and Weber numbers.

We point out a formal analogy between lattice kinetic propagators and Haldane-Wu fractional statistics. The analogy could be used to compute the partition function of fractional quantum systems by solving a corresponding lattice kinetic equation for classical dissipative flowing syst erns. Copyright (C)EPLA, 2018

We present a regularized version of the color gradient lattice Boltzmann (LB) scheme for the simulation of droplet formation in microfluidic devices of experimental relevance. The regularized version is shown to provide computationally efficient access to capillary number regimes relevant to droplet generation via microfluidic devices, such as flow-focusers and the more recent microfluidic step emulsifier devices. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We present a new numerical model to simulate settling trajectories of discretized individual or a mixture of particles of different geometrical shapes in a quiescent fluid and their flow trajectories in a flowing fluid. Simulations unveiled diverse particle settling trajectories as a function of their geometrical shape and density. The effects of the surface concavity of a boomerang particle and aspect ratio of a rectangular particle on the periodicity and amplitude of oscillations in their settling trajectories were numerically captured. Use of surrogate circular particles for settling or flowing of a mixture of non-circular particles were shown to miscalculate particle velocities by a factor of 0.9-2.2 and inaccurately determine the particles' trajectories. In a microfluidic chamber with particles of different shapes and sizes, simulations showed that steady vortices do not necessarily always control particle entrapments, nor do larger particles get selectively and consistently entrapped in steady vortices. Strikingly, a change in the shape of large particles from circular to elliptical resulted in stronger entrapments of smaller circular particles, but enhanced outflows of larger particles, which could be an alternative microfluidics-based method for sorting and separation of particles of different sizes and shapes.

We simulate the two-dimensional fluid flow around National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) 0012 airfoil using a hybrid lattice Boltzmann method (HLBM), which combines the standard lattice Boltzmann method with an unstructured finite-volume formulation. The aim of the study is to assess the numerical performances and the robustness of the computational method. To this purpose, after providing a convergence study to estimate the overall accuracy of the method, we analyze the numerical solution for different values of the angle of attack at a Reynolds number equal to 10(3). Subsequently, flow fields at Reynolds numbers up to 10(4) are computed for a zero angle of attack configuration. A grid refinement scheme is applied to the uniformly spaced component of the overlapping grid system to further enhance the numerical efficiency of the model. The results demonstrate the capability of the HLBM to achieve high accuracy near solid curved walls, thus providing a viable alternative in the realm of off-lattice Boltzmann methods based on body-fitted mesh. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.

We present quantum Lattice Boltzmann simulations of the Dirac equation for quantum-relativistic particles with random mass. By choosing zero-average random mass fluctuation, the simulations show evidence of localization and ultra-slow Sinai diffusion, due to the interference of oppositely propagating branches of the quantum wavefunction which result from random sign changes of the mass around a zero-mean. The present results indicate that the quantum lattice Boltzmann scheme may offer a viable tool for the numerical simulation of quantum-relativistic transport phenomena in topological materials.

We present a numerical scheme to solve the Wigner equation, based on a lattice discretization of momentum space. The moments of the Wigner function are recovered exactly, up to the desired order given by the number of discrete momenta retained in the discretization, which also determines the accuracy of the method. The Wigner equation is equipped with an additional collision operator, designed in such a way as to ensure numerical stability without affecting the evolution of the relevant moments of the Wigner function. The lattice Wigner scheme is validated for the case of quantum harmonic and anharmonic potentials, showing good agreement with theoretical results. It is further applied to the study of the transport properties of one- and two-dimensional open quantum systems with potential barriers. Finally, the computational viability of the scheme for the case of three-dimensional open systems is also illustrated.

In this work we study the problem of mapping soil moisture by means of Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images. A test site has been set in Companhia das Lezirias, close to Lisbon, Portugal. The main advantage of using SAR images is their capability to map soil moisture at a very high spatial resolution. This opens interesting perspectives for agricultural applications, where soil moisture can abruptly change across field boundaries depending on the agricultural practices. The study area is characterized by flat topography, large agricultural areas and sparse vegetation. Five sensors have been deployed in a test area to measure soil moisture with a sampling time of one hour for a period of seven months. In-situ measurements are compared with the results obtained by processing 33 C-band Sentinel-1 images using the SAR interferometry technique. The aim of the study is to analyze the relation between the interferometric phase and time varying soil moisture. The main advantage of SAR interferometry with respect to the use of radar cross-section is that the information about soil moisture can be recovered using a reduced number of in-situ measurements. In particular, we combine three interferograms obtained from three SAR images, acquired over the same area at different times, to derive maps of bi-coherence and phase triplet. This last quantity allows to disentangle the phase contribution due to soil moisture from those related to microwave propagation in atmosphere and terrain displacements. Results are compared to those obtained using the interferometric phase and coherence to emphasize the importance to split the effects due to propagation (e.g. atmosphere) from those related to volume scattering.

A Global Navigational Satellite System (GNSS) tomography system is implemented in the Lisbon area, Portugal, to estimate the water vapor dynamics at a local scale. A field experiment was carried out, in which a series of temporary GNSS stations were installed, increasing the network from 9 permanent stations to a total of 17 GNSS stations. A radiosonde campaign was also performed with high sampling launches, at 4-h intervals, for 1 week. A time series of hourly 3D wet refractivity solutions were obtained during the radiosonde campaign. Radiosonde and Atmospheric Infrared Sounder (AIRS) measurements were used to compute wet refractivity profiles to initialize and update the tomography solutions. The dependence of the GNSS tomography solution on the initial conditions obtained from both radiosonde and AIRS measurements, and their updating frequencies are studied. It is found that the GNSS tomography continuous measurement of the atmospheric refractivity provides solutions with an RMS mean of about 2 g/m(3).

To reduce the data acquisition time and the high-level sidelobes produced by conventional focusing methods for ground-based synthetic aperture radar interferometry, we present a new method to provide accurate displacement maps based on the dimension-reduced compressive sensing (CS) method combined with the multiple measurement vectors (MMVs) model. The proposed CS method consists in selecting the supported area of targets, estimated by the fast conventional method with undersampled data. The following sparse reconstruction is applied only to the selected areas. The MMV-based approach allows increasing the coherence and the precision of displacement estimates. Two experiments are carried out to assess the performance of the proposed method.

In this work, we study the capability of the ground surface to generate Persistent Scatterers (PS) based on the lithology, slope and aspect angles. These properties affect the scattering behavior of the Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) signal, the interferometric phase stability and, as a consequence, the PS generation. Two-time series of interferometric SAR data acquired by two different SAR sensors in the C-band are processed to generate independent PS datasets. The region north of Lisbon, Portugal, characterized by sparse vegetation and lithology diversity, is chosen as study area. The PS frequency distribution is obtained in terms of lithology, slope and aspect angles. This relationship could be useful to estimate the expected PS density in landslide-prone areas, being lithology, slope and aspect angles important landslide predisposing factors.

In this paper we summarize the results of an experiment aiming to compare soil moisture estimates obtained by Sentinel-l interferometric data with in-situ measurements. The study area, located close to Lisbon in Companhia das Lezirias, Portugal is characterized by a flat topography, large agricultural areas and sparse vegetation. In a test site, four soil moisture sensors were deployed and soil moisture was measured (at a depth of 5 cm) for a period of 7 months in an hourly basis. For the same interval of time and with a temporal resolution of 6 days C-band Sentinel-l SAR images were interferometrically processed and coherence, phase and phase triplet images were derived. The in-situ soil moisture measurements have been used to predict the analytical interferometric phases, coherences and phase triplets and compared with the measured interferometric phases in both VV and VH polarimetric channels. As a further analysis, a regression analysis of in-situ soil moisture measurement and Sentinel-l backscattering images has been carried out.

We study the imaging and interferometric performances of a MIMO radar on board of an airship as alternative to airborne and spaceborne SAR remote sensing techniques. Four different MIMO radar arrays are designed working in L, C, X and Ku frequency bands. A frequency bandwidth of 250 MHz has been considered for the MIMO radars. The spatial resolution is 0.6 m in range and 0.3 degree in azimuth. The imaging and interferometric performances of the MIMO radar are analyzed in terms of the airship stability. A synthetic raw data set is generated assuming a target deployed on a flat area at different azimuth angle. This MIMO imaging solution is intended for continuous imaging over an area of interest.

In this work, we study the problem of assimilating high resolution Precipitable Water Vapor (PWV) maps using the Weather Research and Forecast 3D Variational Data assimilation system (WRF-3DVar). The PWV maps are obtained using the Sentinel-1 Synthetic Aperture Radar (SAR) images and the SAR interferometry (InSAR) technique. The influence of the high resolution PWV data on the initial condition of WRF and during the next 12 hours is studied. We demonstrate that the assimilation of InSAR PWV maps increases both the water vapor concentration and temperature over areas affected by extreme weather events so correctly generating localized convection cells. The PWV forecast, after the assimilation of InSAR maps, are compared with the PWV estimates provided by a dense GNSS network. The precipitation pattern and amount are compared to meteorological radar measurements. The case study of the extreme weather event that affected the city of Adra, Spain, on 6 th September 2015, is used to demonstrate how the assimilation of high resolution PWV maps.