Coefficient of restitution for particles impacting on wet surfaces: An improved experimental approach

Abstract

The coefficient of restitution is widely used to characterize the energy dissipation rate in numerical simulations involving particle collisions. The challenge in measuring the coefficient of restitution is the strong scatter seen in experimental data that results from varying particle properties, i.e. shape and surface roughness, and from imperfections in the experimental technique. To minimize this scattering, a novel experimental setup was developed based on two synchronized high-speed cameras capturing the collision behaviour of a particle in three dimensions. To measure the wet restitution coefficient, which describes particle impact in the presence of a liquid layer in the contact region, additional accuracy can be achieved by measuring the liquid layer thickness by a high-precision optical confocal sensor. The coefficient of restitution was measured for glass particles with two different diameters, at different relative velocities and liquid layer thicknesses, with a focus on small collision velocities and thin liquid layers, using both the improved (three dimensional) and the conventional (two dimensional) approaches to quantify the improvement of the new method's accuracy.