MOTION OF TRACER PARTICLES IN A CENTRIFUGAL PUMP AND ITS TRACKING CHARACTERISTICS

The Basset-Boussinesq-Oseen （BBO） equation can be used for most flows to trace the motion of a particle, but in a centrifugal pump, among the forces that act on the particles, one should also include those due to the impeller rotation, as additional effects. This paper firstly reviews various approximations of the BBO equation for the motion of dispersion particles in a viscous fluid. Then based on the motion equation for particles in low Reynolds number centrifugal pumps, a formula for calculating the tracking characteristics of tracer particles is deduced through the Fourier integral transformation. After that the deviations of the particle motion from the fluid motion, as predicted by the various approximations, are discussed and compared. At last, with an emphasis on the Particle Image Velocimetry （PIV） results, the tracking characteristics of particles are estimated. Also, advantages and disadvantages of different tracer particles are discussed and suitable tracer particles for application in PIV studies for flow fields in centrifugal pumps are suggested.

The influence of nano-particle tracers on the slip length measurements by microPTV

Direct measurement of slip length is based on the measured fluid velocity near solid boundary. However, previous micro particle image velocimetry/particle tracking velocimetry （microPIV/PTV） measurements have reported surprisingly large measured near-wall velocities of pressure-driven flow in apparent contradiction with the no-slip hy-pothesis and experimental results from other techniques. To better interpret the measured results of the microPIV/PTV, we performed velocity profile measurements near a hy-drophilic wall （z = 0.25-1.5 μm） with two sizes of tracer particles （φ 50 nm and φ200 nm）. The experimental results indicate that, at less than 1 μm from the wall, the deviations between the measured velocities and no-slip theoretical values obviously decrease from 93% of φ200 nm particles to 48% of φ50 nm particles. The Boltzmann-like exponential measured particle concentrations near wall were found. Based on the non linear Boltzmann distribution of particle concentration and the effective focus plane thickness, we illustrated the reason of the apparent velocity increase near wall and proposed a method to correct the measured velocity profile. By this method, the deviations between the corrected measured velocities and the no-slip theoretical velocity decrease from 45.8% to 10%, and the measured slip length on hy-drophilic glass is revised from 75 nm to 16 nm. These results indicated that the particle size and the biased particle concentration distribution can significantly affect near wall velocity measurement via microPIV/PTV, and result in larger measured velocity and slip length close to wall.

Numerical study on mixing performance of screw elements in intermeshing counter-rotating and co-rotating twin-screw extrudes

The flow process of unplasticized polyvinyl chloride （U PVC） through the mixing zone of intermeshing counter rotating and co rotating twin screw extruders （TSEs） were numerically simula ted by the finite element method. Three dimensional isothermal flow field of U-PVC in two kinds of TSE was calculated. The mixing performance of the screw elements of the extruders was statistically analyzed by particle tracking method. The dispersive mixing performance was characterized by the mixing index, the logarithm of stretching, and the segregation scale. The distributive mixing per forulance was characterized by the resident time distribution. The results indicate that the counter rotating TSE can build higher pressure and generate higher axial velocity and shear rate, whereas the co rotating TSE has better performance in dispersive and distributive mixing.