Dynamique de particules à flottabilité nulle suspendues dans une turbulence isotrope : une étude expérimentale

The dynamics of neutrally buoyant particles in isotropic turbulence : an experimental study

• Auteur / Autrice : Medhi Elhimer
• Direction : Rudy Bazile, Olivier Praud
• Type : Thèse de doctorat
• Discipline(s) : Dynamique des fluides
• Date : Soutenance le 20/06/2012
• Etablissement(s) : Toulouse, INPT
• Ecole(s) doctorale(s) : École doctorale Mécanique, énergétique, génie civil et procédés (Toulouse)
• Partenaire(s) de recherche : Laboratoire : Institut de mécanique des fluides de Toulouse (1930-....)

Mots clés

Mots clés contrôlés

Vélocimétrie par images de particules

Écoulement diphasique

Mots clés libres

Ecoulement diphasiques

Turbulence homogène et isotrope

Vélocimétrie par image de particules

Sotropic turbulence

Two-phase flows

Neutrally-buoyant particles

Finite-size particles

Particle image velocimetry

Particle tracking velocimetry

Résumé

Le but de cette étude expérimentale est de caractériser la dynamique de particules solides, à flottabilité nulle, incluse dans un écoulement turbulent isotrope en décroissance libre. Les particules utilisées sont de forme sphérique et ont un diamètre de 4 à 5 fois plus grand que l'échelle spatial de Kolmogorov de l'écoulement. De part leur taille, les particules ont également un nombre de Stokes proche de l'unité. On s'attend alors à ce que ces particules aient une dynamique différente de celle du fluide environnant. Dans cette étude, on se propose de quantifier les différences de vitesses entre les deux phases à l'aide d'une technique de vélocimétrie simultanée.

In this experimental study, the focus is made on the characterization of the dynamics of solid neutrally buoyant particles embedded in a freely decaying, nearly isotropic turbulence, with a weak mean flow. The particles are spherical with diameters several times larger than the Kolmogorov scale. The study of this flow configuration is still challenging both theoretically and numerically. Due to large particle sizes, the local flow around particles can not be considered as uniform and due to fluid-particle density ratio of around unity, the history and Basset forces cannot be neglected in comparison with the viscous drag force. Particle equation of motion is then fully non-linear, in contrast to the equation for heavy particles with diameters smaller then the Kolmogorov scale, for which only the Stokes drag is considered. In several experimental and numerical studies, the effect of particle size on velocity and acceleration statistics has been investigated (Homann and Bec 2010 ; Qureshi et al. 2008 ; Ouellette et al. 2008 ; Xu and Bodenschatz 2008). In the case of isotropic turbulence, Homann and Bec (2010) show that while the PDF of the particle velocity normalized by the square root of its variance does not vary with particle size, the variance itself is size dependent. A scaling relation for particle velocity variance has been proposed by using the Faxen correction (Gatignol 1983) which takes into account the non uniformity of the fluid flow at the scale of the particle. The aim of our research is to further study the dependence of particle dynamics on particle size. To that purpose, a turbulence generator has been set-up and the resulting turbulence is characterized. Then the flow was seeded with millimeter sized, neutrally-buoyant particles and the velocity of the two phases have been measured simultaneously. Simultaneous measurements of particle and surrounding fluid velocities show that although the global velocity statistics of the two phases have comparable values, the particles may have different local velocity from the velocity of the neighboring fluid