An experimental study of the motion of a light sphere in a rotating viscous fluid

We present the results of an experimental investigation of the motion of a light, solid sphere in a horizontal rotating cylinder filled with viscous fluid. At high rotation rates, the sphere sits near the axis of the cylinder. At lower rotation rates, a set of off-axis fixed points are observed for...

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Bibliographic Details
Published inJournal of fluid mechanics Vol. 847; pp. 119 - 133
Main Authors Sauma-Pérez, T., Johnson, C. G., Yang, L., Mullin, T.
Format Journal Article
LanguageEnglish
Published Cambridge, UK Cambridge University Press 25.07.2018
Subjects
Computational fluid dynamics
Cylinders
Experiments
Fluid flow
Gravity
Hopf bifurcation
JFM Papers
Orbits
Reynolds number
Rotating cylinders
Rotating fluids
Rotating spheres
Rotation
Spheres
Viscous fluids
particle/fluid flow
Stokesian dynamics
low-Reynolds-number flows
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Summary:We present the results of an experimental investigation of the motion of a light, solid sphere in a horizontal rotating cylinder filled with viscous fluid. At high rotation rates, the sphere sits near the axis of the cylinder. At lower rotation rates, a set of off-axis fixed points are observed for a range of sphere radii. The locations of these fixed points are in quantitative agreement with the predictions of a model based on available theory. The fixed points are observed to become unstable to periodic orbits below a critical Reynolds number $Re_{c}$ . The radius of the observed orbits increases with Reynolds number more slowly than a typical Hopf bifurcation, in this case, growing as $1/Re^{2}$ .
ISSN:0022-1120
1469-7645
DOI:10.1017/jfm.2018.330