Turbulent scales of dilute particle-laden flows in microgravity

Abstract

The work described in this paper attempts to characterize the effects of inertia, isolated from gravity, on the dispersion of solid particles in a turbulent air flow. The experiment consisted of releasing particles of various sizes in an enclosed box of fan-generated, near-homogeneous, isotropic, and stationary turbulent airflow and examining the particle behavior in a microgravity environment. The turbulence box was characterized in ground-based experiments using laser Doppler velocimetry techniques. Microgravity was established by free floating the experiment apparatus during the parabolic trajectory of NASA’s KC-135 reduced-gravity aircraft. The microgravity generally lasted about 20 s, with about 50 parabolas per flight and one flight per day over a testing period of four days. To cover a broad range of flow regimes of interest, particles with Stokes numbers St of about 1–100 were released in the turbulence box. The three-dimensional measurements of particle motion were made with a particle-tracking algorithm using a three-camera stereo imaging system. Digital photogrammetric techniques were used to determine the particle locations from the calibrated camera images. The epipolar geometry constraint identified matching particles from the three different camera views and a direct spatial intersection scheme determined the coordinates of particles in three-dimensional space. Since particle loadings were light, velocity and acceleration constraints allowed particles in a sequence of frames to be matched, resulting in particle tracks and dispersion measurements. The goal was to compare the dispersion of different Stokes number particles in zero gravity and thereby decouple the effects of gravity from inertia on the dispersion. Results show that higher inertia particles disperse less in isotropic, nondecaying turbulent flows under zero gravity, in agreement with current models. Measurements show that particles with St≈1 dispersed about ten times more than the St≈100 particles.