Contact problems for particles in a shear flow

This paper focuses on improving the description of the contact between solid particles in a fluid flow. The numerical approach used is related to the fictitious domain method for the fluid-solid problem. It is associated to a gluey particle model in order to improve the behaviour of the particles during their contacts as a Lagrangian method is applied for their displacement. The numerical methodology is validated through 2D and 3D computations describing interactions of two particles in a shear flow. The results obtained show the ability of the scheme to recover the reversibility of the Stokes equations, even for 3D configurations. Finally, another example is studied with larger number of particles.