Experimental detection of turbulent thermal diffusion of aerosols in non-isothermal flows

Abstract

We studied experimentally a new phenomenon of turbulent thermal diffusion of particles which can cause formation of the large-scale aerosol layers in the vicinity of the atmospheric temperature inversions. This phenomenon was detected experimentally in oscillating grids turbulence in air flow. Three measurement techniques were used to study turbulent thermal diffusion in strongly inhomogeneous temperature fields, namely Particle Image Velocimetry to determine the turbulent velocity field, an image processing technique to determine the spatial distribution of aerosols, and an array of thermocouples for the temperature field. Experiments are presented for both, stably and unstably stratified fluid flows, by using both directions of the imposed mean vertical temperature gradient. We demonstrated that even in strongly inhomogeneous temperature fields particles in turbulent fluid flow accumulate at the regions with minimum of mean temperature of surrounding fluids due to the phenomenon of turbulent thermal diffusion. © Author(s) 2006.