High Speed Visulization of Multphase Mixing

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This proposal is for a general purpose flow visualization setup which uses a laser sheet and fast CCD camera to record the break-up and coalescence of droplets, local concentration of particles in multi-modal particle distributions, and the turbulent mixing of a passive or reacting scalar. This is a very powerful tool which will significantly expand the experimental capabilities of two complementary research groups.  Prof. Derksen studies mixing in multiphase flows with an emphasis on computational methods, and in particular the lattice Boltzmann approach.  Prof. Kresta studies turbulent mixing problems, with an emphasis on experiments and simplified engineering models which lead to improvements in mixing equipment design.  Both professors are passionate about increasing our physical understanding of mixing at the mesoscales, particularly in multiphase systems.  The need for experiments in industrially oriented fluid mechanics research has increased over the last five years. At the same time, the quality of high speed flow visualization has evolved towards high resolution, quantitative data that provide a great deal of information. These video images can be collected relatively quickly and inexpensively, although the quantitative analysis of the data is more involved.  In Derksen's group, the visualization data will provide validation and guidance for computational approaches. These data are needed to develop models for specific phenomena that can not be directly computed, to validate computational approaches, and to bring out the essential physical phenomena when exploring complex processes.  In Kresta's group, image analysis techniques based on spatial statistics will be developed in parallel with research on specific mixing problems. It is anticipated that these methods will find application in combustion and multiphase flows as well as on problems specifically related to mixing.  High speed visualization is a powerful tool which will dramatically improve our ability to probe and understand these complex and industrially important multiphase flow phenomena.