The flow induced by a spherical particle spinning in the presence of no-slip planar boundaries is studied by numerical means. In addition to the reference case of an infinite fluid, the situations considered include a sphere rotating near one or two infinite plane walls parallel or perpendicular to the axis of rotation and a sphere centred within a cube. The hydrodynamic force and couple acting on the sphere exhibit a complex behaviour under the sometimes competing, sometimes cooperating action of viscous, inertial and centrifugal effects.

The finite-Reynolds-number three-dimensional flow in a channel bounded by one and two parallel porous walls is studied numerically. The porous medium is modelled by spheres in a simple cubic arrangement. Detailed results on the flow structure and the hydrodynamic forces and couple acting on the sphere layer bounding the porous medium are reported and their dependence on the Reynolds number illustrated. It is shown that, at finite Reynolds numbers, a lift force acts on the spheres, which may be expected to contribute to the mobilization of bottom sediments. The results for the slip velocity at the surface of the porous layers are compared with the phenomenological Beavers-Joseph model. It is found that the values of the slip coefficient for pressure-driven and shear-driven flow are somewhat different, and also depend on the Reynolds number. A modification of the relation is suggested to deal with these features. The Appendix provides an alternative derivation of this modified relation.

SUMMARYIn this paper, a robust projection method on a locally refined mesh is proposed for two-and threedimensional viscous incompressible flows. The proposed method is robust not only when the interface between two meshes is located in a smooth flow region but also when the interface is located in a flow region with large gradients and/or strong unsteadiness. In numerical simulations, a locally refined mesh saves many grid points in regions of relatively small gradients compared with a uniform mesh. For efficiency and ease of implementation, we consider a two-level blocked structure, for which both of the coarse and fine meshes are uniform Cartesian ones individually. Unfortunately, the introduction of the two-level blocked mesh results in an important but difficult issue: coupling of the coarse and fine meshes. In this paper, by properly addressing the issue of the coupling, we propose a stable and accurate projection method on a locally refined staggered mesh for both two-and three-dimensional viscous incompressible flows. The proposed projection method is based on two principles: the linear interpolation technique and the consistent discretization of both sides of the pressure Poisson equation. The proposed algorithm is straightforward owing to the linear interpolation technique, is stable and accurate, is easy to extend from two-to three-dimensional flows, and is valid even when flows with large gradients cross the interface between the two meshes. The resulting pressure Poisson equation is non-symmetric on a locally refined mesh. The numerical results for a series of exact solutions for 2D and 3D viscous incompressible flows verify the stability and accuracy of the proposed projection method. The method is also applied to some challenging problems, including turbulent flows around particles, flows induced by impulsively started/stopped particles, and flows induced by particles near solid walls, to test the stability and accuracy.