Achievement

Trainee Michael Crochet (Mechanical Engineering, ME) working with Professors Gonthier (ME) and Tohline (Physics) reports a multiphase continuum theory, capable of describing engineering-scale compressible flows containing an arbitray number of solid particle sizes within a gas, was formulated and computationally implemented. A comprehensive study was performed to characterize how initial particle size and volume fraction affect spatial flow structure due to constant speed impact. The complex structures were found to be sensitive to the selection of partition functions, which determine the amount of drag and compaction dissipation assigned to each phase. Flow predictions are being used to guide the development of a reduced asymptotic model for mixtures of disparate size particles that result in fine scale structure which is difficult to computationally resolve.