Seminarium Zakładu Mechaniki i Fizyki Płynów

Velocity fluctuations in sedimenting suspensions

mgr Krzysztof Sadlej (Instytut Fizyki Teoretycznej UW)

środa, 16 kwietnia 2003

The sedimentation of a monodisperse non-Brownian suspension of hard spheres is considered. In 1985 Caflish & Luke pointed out that due to the long range character of hydrodynamic interactions, the fluctuations in velocity about the mean value should diverge in the sense that they grow without bound as the linear macroscopic size of the container is increased. On the other hand recent experiments show no such behavior. Contrary, the variance of the sedimentation velocity seems to be universal, independent of container size. I will concentrate mainly on doscussing the above problem, showing the results of some experiments and numerical simulations, as well as presenting theoretical ideas trying to explain this intriguing behavior.