Simulating the Motion of Flexible Pulp Fibres Using the Immersed Boundary Method

✍ Scribed by John M. Stockie; Sheldon I. Green

• Publisher: Elsevier Science
• Year: 1998
• Tongue: English
• Weight: 331 KB
• Volume: 147
• Category: Article
• ISSN: 0021-9991
• DOI: 10.1006/jcph.1998.6086

✦ Synopsis

The motion of flexible fibres suspended in an incompressible fluid is of interest to researchers in a wide variety of fields, including reinforced composite materials, biotechnology, and the pulp and paper industry. In this work, we concentrate on the application to pulp fibres and demonstrate how the complex hydrodynamic interaction between a flexible fibre and the surrounding fluid can be simulated using the immersed boundary method. The computations involve a single fibre suspended in a two-dimensional shear flow at moderate Reynolds number. Previous experimental work differentiates the observed fibre motions into a well-defined set of "orbit classes," which are reproduced in our simulations for fibres with varying flexibility. The computed fibre orientation angle distributions are compared to classical theoretical results and shown to exhibit a skewness which is not captured by either the linear theory or other recent numerical computations that ignore the fibre-fluid interaction. These simulations set the stage for further work in modeling flows with multiple fibres in three dimensions for the purpose of improving the papermaking process.