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TRANSPORT OF PHASE-CHANGING INERTIAL PARTICLES IN GEOPHYSICAL FLOWS

TRANSPORT OF PHASE-CHANGING INERTIAL PARTICLES IN GEOPHYSICAL FLOWS

தேதி18th Nov 2021

Time02:00 PM

Venue Meeting Link: https://us02web.zoom.us/j/83204771641?pwd=eXMvaTgzSXpiWnRWMDEzYUY2NWY1UT09

PAST EVENT

Details

Particles that undergo phase change are often observed in various geophysical flows, for instance, the condensing droplets in warm cumulus clouds and the evaporating sea spray droplets in the marine atmospheric boundary layer. During the phase change, droplets exchange heat and mass with their ambient, which causes their condensation in supersaturated environments and evaporation in subsaturated environments. The condensing droplets will grow in size, and the evaporating ones will shrink. This change in the size of droplets can affect their inertia (characterised by Stokes number, St). Inertial effects would dominate for larger droplets whereas smaller droplets would be influenced by thermal fluctuations. The effects of particle inertia in particle-laden flows has been extensively studied. One-way momentum transport from ambient flow to the suspended particles is shown to accumulate them in straining regions of the flow preferentially and also result in formation of caustics, a signature of multivaluedness in the particle momentum field. However, the coupled effects of phase change and particle inertia is relatively unexplored, though relevant in droplet-laden geophysical flows. Thus, along with other physics such as fluid inertia, particle inertia, background turbulence, gravitational settling, thermal fluctuations, the inclusion of the phase change aspect of particles will lead to a more complete understanding of particle dispersion in geophysical flows. As a preliminary study, we have worked on the dispersion of particles in a two-dimensional cellular vortex flow by accounting for condensational growth, particle inertia and thermal fluctuations. In the absence of condensation and thermal fluctuations, only particles with a Stokes number St > 1/4 can leave the cell in which they are initialised, i.e. by crossing the separating streamlines between the vortices. We found that the condensing particles gradually acquire more inertia, and irrespective of their initial Stokes number, they cross the separatrices of the flow. We use a WKB analysis to evaluate the exit time of a condensing droplet from the initial cell for atmospherically relevant condensation growth rates. For asymptotically large time instants, these particles travel ballistically away from their initial positions and enhance their spreading in the ambient. The inclusion of thermal noise in the system was also found to enhance their spreading. Our future study will be focused on exploring the dispersion of droplets with the coupled effects of particle inertia and their thermodynamics in a turbulent background flow using direct numerical simulations.

Speakers

Mr. Anu V. S. Nath (AM18D701)

Dept. of Applied Mechanics