Active Manipulation of a Particle-laden Jet

The interaction of a particle-laden jet with a single synthetic jet or a continuous control jet located upstream of the main jet exit (i.e., within the main jet nozzle) was examined experimentally using PIV and PTV. A reduction technique was used to calculate 3-D flow fields from multiple 2-D measurement planes to study the complex 3-D interactions. The synthetic jet was shown to influence the particles both directly and indirectly through the manipulation of the carrier fluid’s drag force on the particles. The synthetic jet impulse directly vectors the particles away from the synthetic jet, while the formation of large vortical structures indirectly affects the particles, spreading throughout the measurement domain. By comparison, a continuous control jet only vectors the particles away from itself. The lowest Stokes number particles respond similarly to the carrier fluid, while higher Stokes number particles are less responsive to the control and only follow the strong vortical structures (i.e., higher circulation), which suggests that the preferential concentration concept depends on both the Stokes number as well as the strength of the coherent structures.