Theoretical and Experimental Study of Grouping Effects on Droplet Streams

Grouping of droplets was studied in monodisperse droplet streams. This very controllable system allows to study basic effects. In experiments droplet streams with monodisperse droplets were generated, however, with initially two different inter droplet spacing. A larger inter droplet spacing is followed by a little bit smaller one, which is followed by a larger one and so on. Due to this initial boundary condition groups of two droplets form, which approach each other and finally coagulate. It was found, that the velocity of the droplet approach is linearly dependent on the spacing between the droplets. This process was simulated by direct numerical simulation using the in-house code FS3D. The results of the simulations show the same linear behaviour. For larger computational domains the numerical results approach the experimental results.