Student Posters Repository

There is a rich body of numerical, experimental and theoretical work looking at the role of turbulence in particle collisions, with a particular emphasis on how it might accelerate the evolution of clouds in the atmosphere. This study is a continuation of that lineage. I perform direct numerical simulations of isotropic turbulence with embedded droplets that, upon collision, coalesce to produce a daughter droplet that conserves the mass and momentum of the parent droplets. As a consequence of coalescence, the droplet size distribution evolves over time from its monodisperse initial condition. The work is an extension of Reade and Collins (J. Fluid Mech. 415:45-64, 2000), which considered the same problem at a much lower Reynolds number. Important effects of intermittency at Reynolds numbers that are several-fold higher are observed. My simulation will take into account those intermittency effects and consequent influence on the evolution of the size distribution with varying particle size, volume fraction and number density. The collisions do not yet take into account the effect of the lubricating gas layer, which will be the topic of my future work