| dc.description.abstract | The knowledge of the behavior of non-spherical particles suspended in turbulent flows covers a wide range of applications in engineering and science. Dispersed two-phase flows and turbulence are the most challenging subjects in engineering, and when combined it gives rise to more complexities as the result of the inherent stochastic nature of the turbulence of the carrier-phase together with the random distribution of the dispersed phase. Moreover, for anisotropic particles the coupling between the translation and rotation of particle increases the complication. Because of the practical importance of prolate particleladen turbulent flows, the plenty of numerical and experimental works have been conducted to study such suspensions.
Numerical approaches have given valuable insight of turbulent suspension flows, although the computation has been only carried out at the macro scale and models, not including flow distortion around the particle, comprise the detail of the flow in the order of a particle size. In addition, the model of the forces imposed on the particle by the fluid and mass point treatment are strictly valid for infinitely small particle having size less than all scales of the fluid turbulence. Fully resolved solution at the scale of the dispersed phase in turbulent flows for high Reynolds number has been recently performed but is still a challenge.
On the other hand, the presence of particle as the dispersed phase makes experimental measurements much more complicated than those with single phase as a result of particles interference. The area of considerable difficulty with this type of experiments is the measurement of the fluid-phase velocity remarkably close to the particle surface. Generally, experimental researches have been concentrated on measuring the mean velocity and Reynolds stresses of the carrier-phase, and the mean velocity, fluctuations, orientation and accumulation of the non-spherical particles. Higher-order quantities, including Lagrangian particle velocity correlations, the carrier-phase turbulence modulation, and two-particle and particlefluid velocity correlations are also of interest.
It has been found that the rotational and translational movements of the fibershaped particle depend on the nature of carrier-phase field and fiber characteristics such as aspect ratio, fiber Stokes number, fiber Reynolds number, and the ratio of fiber to flow length scale.
With the development of PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) and PTV (Particle Tracking Velocimetry) techniques, it has been appeared that combined PIV/PTV will be the best available choice for the experimental study of dispersed two-phase flows. The purpose of combined PIV/PTV measurement of two-phase systems is simultaneous measurements of fluid and suspended objects, where the PIV measurement of the fluid phase are combined with PTV measurement of the dispersed phase.
The objective of this doctoral thesis is to study the behavior of rod-like particles suspended in wall-bounded turbulent flow through simultaneous PIV/PTV measurements of the velocity of the flow field and particle motion. As a representative of rod-like particles, I have employed cellulose acetate fibers with the length to diameter ratio (aspect ratio) larger than one. Here, It has been considered only dilute suspensions with no flocculation; thus fiber-fiber interaction is negligible. The measurements have been conducted within the parallel planes (2D view) illuminated by laser in the streamwise direction in thin film suspension flowing on the water table setup at Linné FLOW Centre, KTH Mechanics Lab. It is shown that this setup is a well-behaved experimental model of half channel flows often used in Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) investigations. Therefore, the experimental results are comparable to their DNS counterpart where it is convenient. A single camera PIV technique has been used to measure flowing suspension. Therefore, it has been needed to preprocess images using a spatial median filter to separate images of two phases, tracer particles as representative of fluid and fibers suspended. The well-known PIV processing algorithms have been applied to the phase of fluid. I have also introduced a novel algorithm to recognize and match fibers in consecutive images to track fibers and estimate their velocity.
It is not feasible to study all relevant aspects of particle-laden turbulent flows in a single study. In this study, I present the statistics of the rotational and translational motion of fiber-like particles and the surrounding fluid velocity. To the author’s knowledge, remarkably little experimental work has been published to date on simultaneous measurement of fiber motion and turbulence field in a turbulent fiber suspension flow to reveal dynamics of fibers in this regime. Therefore, the results of this work will be profitable in better understanding of such multiphase flows. The statistical analysis of the translational motion of fibers shows that the size of fiber is a significant factor for the dynamical behavior of the fiber near the wall. It has been observed that, in the region near the wall, the probability of presence of the long fibers is high in both the high-speed and low-speed streaks of flow, and the mean velocity of fibers almost conforms to the mean velocity of flow; whereas the short fibers are mostly present in the low-speed areas, and the fiber mean velocity obey the dominant flow velocity in these areas. In the far-wall regions, the translation of fibers is practically unaffected by the aspect ratio, whereas it depends crucially on the wall-normal distance. Moreover, it was found that in the case of long fibers near the wall, the low speed fibers mostly are orientated in streamwise direction. On the other hand, there is no preferential orientation for fast long fibers. Although wall-normal velocities were not measured in this study, it is hypothesized that this behavior is a result of fibers being affected by the sweep and ejection events known to occur in wall-bounded turbulent flow. The fast fibers are in sweep environment and comes from the upper layer. The low speed fibers are into ejection areas in the vicinity of the wall, and the wall has a stabilizing effect on them. The short fibers are still oriented mostly in streamwise direction for a certain range of low velocity. Furthermore, since a considerable change of the fiber behavior is observed in a certain ratio of the fiber length to the fiber distance from the solid wall, it is supposed that this ratio is also a prominent parameter for the behavior of fiber near the wall.
The results presented are in terms of viscous wall units wherever are denoted by superscript “+”. | nb_NO |