Aerosols are ubiquitous, and particle capture from particle-laden air as it flows past an obstacle is of widespread practical importance. Neglecting diffusion, previous work has shown that for a smooth curved surface in both Stokes flow and inviscid flow, only particles with inertia above a threshold value (quantified by the nondimensional Stokes number) collide with the surface. Here we show that the critical Stokes number decreases with increasing Reynolds number of the air flow, and the mechanism behind this threshold is the same at all finite Reynolds numbers but becomes qualitatively different in the limit of infinite Reynolds number (inviscid flow). In addition we show that in the latter case (inviscid flow) the threshold is set solely by the flow near the stagnation point, whereas at finite Reynolds numbers the threshold also depends on the flow far from the stagnation point. The threshold also depends on obstacle geometry and we show that fibers whose cross section is flattened along the flow direction have greater size selectivity than fibers with a circular cross section.
Hydrodynamic problems with stagnation points are of particular importance in fluid mechanics as they allow study and investigation of elongational flows. In this article, the uniaxial elongational flow appearing at the surface of a viscoelastic drop and its role on the deformation of the droplet at low inertial regimes is studied. In studies related to viscoelastic droplets falling/raising in an immiscible Newtonian fluids, it is well known that by increasing the Deborah number (the ratio of the relaxation time of the interior fluid to a reference time scale) the droplet might lose its spheric…
Recent studies of pseudo-plane ideal flow (PIF) reveal a ubiquitous presence of vortex alignment in both homogeneous and stratified fluids, and in both inertial and rotating reference frames as well. The exact solutions of a steady-state PIF model suggest that stagnation points tend to be vertically aligned and the concentric structure represents a fixed-point phenomenon of the Euler equations. Exception occurs in the rotating frame when a flow holds inertial period and skew center becomes possible. Properties of stagnation points based on Morse theory are obtained, leading to a topological ex…
Hydrodynamic forces acting on a neutrally-buoyant spherical particle immersed in a wall-bounded axisymmetric stagnation point flow (Hiemenz-Homann flow) are predicted, based on a suitable form of the reciprocal theorem. An approximate algebraic form of the undisturbed velocity field is set up, mimicking the gradual transition of the actual carrying flow throughout the boundary layer, from a pure linear straining flow in the bulk to a parabolic flow at the wall. The particle Reynolds number is assumed to be small and predictions based on the creeping-flow assumption are first derived. Then, ine…
An analytical solution is proposed to predict the crown propagation, generated by a single droplet impact on wetted walls. This approach enables a smooth transition from the inertia-driven to the viscous-controlled regime of crown propagation. The modelling strategy is based on the stagnation-point flow, because it resembles closely the hydrodynamic flow in the lamella and offers two main advantages. First, it allows a simple estimation of the wall-film thinning rate, caused by the impulse transfer from the impacting droplet to the wall film. Second, thanks to the self-similarity of the soluti…
The Earth's atmosphere is an aerosol, it contains suspended particles. When air flows over an obstacle such as an aircraft wing or tree branch, these particles may not follow the same paths as the air flowing around the obstacle. Instead the particles in the air may deviate from the path of the air and so collide with the surface of the obstacle. It is known that particle inertia can drive this deposition, and that there is a critical value of this inertia, below which no point particles deposit. Particle inertia is measured by the Stokes number, St. We show that near the critical value of the…
We study the three-dimensional clustering of velocity stagnation points, of nulls of the vorticity and of the Lagrangian acceleration, and of inertial particles in turbulent flows at fixed Reynolds numbers, but under different large-scale flow geometries. To this end, we combine direct numerical simulations of homogeneous and isotropic turbulence and of the Taylor-Green flow, with particle tracking velocimetry in a von Kármán experiment. While flows have different topologies (as nulls cluster differently), particles behave similarly in all cases, indicating that Taylor-scale neutrally buoyant …
The rate at which small inertial particles collide with a moderate-Reynolds-number spherical body is found to be strongly affected when the formers are also settling under the effect of gravity. The sedimentation of small particles indeed changes the critical Stokes number above which collisions occur. This is explained by the presence of a shielding effect caused by the unstable manifolds of a stagnation-saddle point of an effective velocity field perceived by the small particles. It is also found that there exists a secondary critical Stokes number above which no collisions occur. This is du…
In this paper we investigate, using theory and Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS), the Forward In Time (FIT) and Backward In Time (BIT) Probability Density Functions (PDFs) of the separation of inertial particle-pairs in isotropic turbulence. In agreement with our earlier study (Bragg et al., Phys. Fluids 28, 013305 (2016)), where we compared the FIT and BIT mean-square separations, we find that inertial particles separate much faster BIT than FIT, with the strength of the irreversibility depending upon the final/initial separation of the particle-pair and their Stokes number $St$. However, we…
This article shows the importance of flow compressibility on the heat transfer in confined impinging jets, and how it is driven by both the Mach number and the wall heat-flux. Hence, we present a collection of cases at several Mach numbers with different heat-flux values applied at the impingement wall. The wall temperature scales linearly with the imposed heat-flux and the adiabatic wall temperature is found to be purely governed by the flow compression. Especially for high heat-flux values, the non-constant wall temperature induces considerable differences in the thermal conductivity of the …
Inertia-gravity waves (IGWs) play an essential role in the terrestrial atmospheric dynamics as they can lead to energy and momentum flux when propagating upwards. An open question is to which extent IGWs contribute to the total energy and to flattening of the energy spectrum observed at the mesoscale. In this work, we present an experimental investigation of the energy distribution between the large-scale balanced flow and the small-scale imbalanced flow. Weakly nonlinear IGWs emitted from baroclinic jets are observed in the differentially heated rotating annulus experiment. Similar to the atm…
