Dispersion of Droplet Clouds in Turbulence.

We measure the absolute dispersion of clouds of monodisperse, phosphorescent droplets in turbulent air by means of high-speed image-intensified video recordings. Laser excitation allows the initial preparation of well-defined, pencil-shaped luminous droplet clouds in a completely nonintrusive way. We find that the dispersion of the clouds is faster than the dispersion of fluid elements. We speculate that preferential concentration of inertial droplet clouds is responsible for the enhanced dispersion.

Measuring droplet size distributions from overlapping interferometric particle images.

Interferometric particle imaging provides a simple way to measure the probability density function (PDF) of droplet sizes from out-focus images. The optical setup is straightforward, but the interpretation of the data is a problem when particle images overlap. We propose a new way to analyze the images. The emphasis is not on a precise identification of droplets, but on obtaining a good estimate of the PDF of droplet sizes in the case of overlapping particle images. The algorithm is tested using synthetic and experimental data. We next use these methods to measure the PDF of droplet sizes produced by spinning disk aerosol generators. The mean primary droplet diameter agrees with predictions from the literature, but we find a broad distribution of satellite droplet sizes.