People
| Post Doctoral Fellow | René van Hout |
| Project Supervisors | Prof. Joseph Katz |
| Visiting Professor | Prof. Tim Garrison York College, PA |
| Design and Technical Support | Yury Ronzhes Stephen King |
Outline
The Particle Couette Facility has been designed for the measurement of the drag and lift coefficient on a single pollen grain. The facility consists of two concentric perspex cylinders that can both be rotated at a maximum speed of 3600 rpm. Pollen is being injected into the annulus through a specially designed injection chamber that is remotely controlled. In order to measure the drag and lift force on a single pollen particle, quadruple exposure PIV technique is used to both resolve the velocity and acceleration field. This information is used to solve the force balance on a single pollen grain.
The drag and lift coefficients are required to model suspension away from the anther and subsequent transport into the atmosphere at the larger scales.
Facility
A schematic layout of the Particle Couette facility is shown below. The facility consists of two perspex cylinders, inner cylinder D = 5″ and outer cylinder D = 9″ that can rotate independently at a maximum rate of 3600 rpm.
Particle Couette Facility: Two camera setup, outer and inner cylinder
Two camera setup
Laser beams combining optics
Fig. 2 Pollen Injection Mechanism
Results
Preliminary measurements have been carried out using one camera to characterize the flow field.
Relative motion between the pollen grain and the air velocity inside the annulus
