Settling of spherical particles in the transitional regime

TL;DR

This study investigates the settling behavior of large spherical particles in viscous fluids across transitional and Newtonian regimes, revealing deviations from classical models and novel optical phenomena.

Contribution

It provides experimental data on particle settling in transitional regimes, compares results with analytical and numerical models, and reports new optical effects observed around PTFE spheres.

Findings

Deviations from analytical solutions for Reynolds numbers 300-1100.

Early deceleration of particles in the transitional flow regime.

Detection of a novel optical reflection phenomenon around PTFE spheres.

Abstract

The settling process and wall impact of large spherical particles in a stagnant, highly viscous fluid has been observed by means of high-speed shadow imaging. The particles included in this study vary in size and material properties: steel, polytetrafluorethylen (PTFE), polyoxymethylen (POM), or rubber. The corresponding terminal Reynolds numbers range from 333 to 4012, covering in principle the transitional and Newton regime for drag forces. For collision studies, the Stokes number just before impact is also relevant, and lies in the range 50 < St < 2250. The settling curves obtained experimentally are compared with numerical and analytical solutions. The latter has been derived on the basis of nominal terminal velocity and relaxation time for the Stokes and Newton regimes. A deviation between experimental results and analytical solution was observed in all cases where the terminal Reynolds number is larger than 300 and smaller than 1100. In this flow regime, the settling process of the spheres is already affected at a long distance from the impact object, leading to an early but significant deceleration. Moreover, a reduced settling velocity was observed along the whole trajectory for the PTFE particles with the lowest terminal Reynolds number. All processed datasets are available via the Mendeley Data repository. Two additional effects have been observed during this study. First, a bright region was detected around all PTFE spheres. It finally was found to be due to total light reflection around the sphere, but, to the best of our knowledge, this peculiarity has never been reported before. Being purely optical, this does not effect the settling behavior for PTFE. On the other hand, partial absorption of liquid at the particle surface was observed for rubber, leading to a reduced sedimentation velocity.