Ring waves as a mass transport mechanism in air-driven core-annular flows.
Air-driven core-annular fluid flows occur in many situations, from lung airways to engineering applications. Here we study, experimentally and theoretically, flows where a viscous liquid film lining the inside of a tube is forced upwards against gravity by turbulent airflow up the center of the tube. We present results on the thickness and mean speed of the film and properties of the interfacial waves that develop from an instability of the air-liquid interface. We derive a long-wave asymptotic model and compare properties of its solutions with those of the experiments. Traveling wave solutions of this long-wave model exhibit evidence of different mass transport regimes: Past a certain threshold, sufficiently large-amplitude waves begin to trap cores of fluid which propagate upward at wave speeds. This theoretical result is then confirmed by a second set of experiments that show evidence of ring waves of annular fluid propagating over the underlying creeping flow. By tuning the parameters of the experiments, the strength of this phenomenon can be adjusted in a way that is predicted qualitatively by the model.
Carolina Center for Interdisciplinary Applied Mathematics, Department of Mathematics, University of North Carolina, Chapel Hill, North Carolina 27599-3250, USA.
Roberto
R
Camassa
M Gregory
MG
Forest
Long
L
Lee
H Reed
HR
Ogrosky
Jeffrey
J
Olander
D000465:Algorithms; D000818:Animals; D001696:Biomechanical Phenomena; D001703:Biophysics / Q000379:methods*; D003198:Computer Simulation; D005583:Fourier Analysis; D006801:Humans; D008168:Lung / Q000502:physiology*; D008954:Models, Biological; D017711:Nonlinear Dynamics; D012984:Software; D013997:Time Factors; D014783:Viscosity