Proceedings of the 19th IAHR-APD Congress 2014, Hanoi, Vietnam

ISBN 978604821338-1

PARTICLE PLUMES IN A TURBULENT BACKGROUND

ADRIAN C.H. LAI(1), S. N. CHAN(2,a) , J. W. ER(2,b) , ADRIAN W.K. LAW(2,c) & E. ERIC ADAMS(3)
(1)
Center for Environmental Sensing and Modeling, Singapore-MIT Alliance for Research and Technology Centre, Singapore
e-mail adrian.lai@smart.mit.edu
(2)
School of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Nanyang Technological University, Singapore
e-mail (a) SNCHAN@ntu.edu.sg; (b) JER001@e.ntu.edu.s; (c) cwklaw@ntu.edu.sg
(3)
Department of Civil and Environmental Engineering, Massachusetts Institute of Technology, Cambridge, USA
e-mail eeadams@mit.edu

ABSTRACT
We report in this paper the first study on particle plumes in a turbulent background. A jet array in which each jet was
programmed to turn on and off randomly was used to generate a roughly isotropic and homogeneous turbulence.
Particles of sizes range from 0.0675 mm to 0.725 mm were discharged continuously from a submerged hourglass to
produce steady plume flows into the turbulent background. The changes in plume mixing characteristics (comparing to
plumes in quiescent ambient) due to the effect of turbulence is reported. The breakdown of some plumes due to the
turbulence were observed and a criteria for the breaking down of plume is presented.

Keywords: Two-phase flows; Turbulence; Particle Plumes; Plume breakdown.

1. INTRODUCTION a background turbulence, and was reasonably successful

A particle plume is a continuous source of buoyancy
generated by dense/buoyant particle flows. It is an
important type of two-phase flow related to many
geophysical, air quality, and environmental fluid
mechanics problems. Black smokers released from
hydrothermal vents on seabed in deep ocean (Turner and
Campbell, 1987), carrying dissolved minerals and sulfide
particles, can support communities of chemosynthetic
organisms; ash carried by volcano eruptions to the
atmosphere (Woods, 2010) can severely affect air traffic;
dispersion of chimney plumes can have an impact to the
surrounding air quality. Of particular importance to
Singapore is the land reclamation, in which sediment is
dumped into water continuously in some cases to create
land mass; sediment loss to the surroundings during its
descent can affect adversely the nearby water quality. It is
often essential to predict the mixing characteristics of
these plumes, for example in environmental impact
assessment or disaster management. Extensive studies of
a plume have been made in the past and there are now
established theories to make predictions (e.g. Fischer et
al., 1979, Lee and Chu, 2003).
Quite often, the ambient fluid of these plumes is not
quiescent but contains a certain degree of turbulence. It is
of interest to understand how the plume mixing will be
affected in a background turbulence. Only a few studies
in the past have made such an attempt. Ching et al. (1995)
had studied a line plume in turbulent background
generated by an oscillating grid, and found that the line
plume breaks down when its characteristic velocity is less
than 1.6 times of the background turbulence intensity.
Cuthbertson et al. (2006) had made similar study of a
round turbulent buoyant jet, and established the
breakdown criteria for the jet using dimensional analysis.
Hubner (2004) developed an integral model of a plume in
in predicting the sudden spread of the plume close to its
breakdown point. Recently, Khorsandi et al. (2013)
studied the effect of roughly isotropic and homogeneous
turbulence on a jet using a random jet array (Variano and
Cowen, 2008), and reported important several jet mixing
characteristics changes due to the turbulence.
In all of these studies, only a single-phase plume flow
was studied; the effect of particles together with a
background turbulence on a plume has never been
explored. We report in this paper the first attempt to
study a particle plume in a turbulent background.
Experiments carried out will first be described, followed
by observation. The change in particle plume mixing due
to turbulence will be reported, and finally a theory will
be presented to estimate the plume breakdown point.
2. EXPERIMENTS
Experiments were carried out in a 2.4 m long x 1.2 m
wide x 2.0 m deep glass tank. The experimental setup of
this study is given in Figure 1. An isotropic turbulent
background with low mean flow was generated using an
array of bilge pumps mounted on a vertical wall covering
an area of 1.2 m x 2.0 m, and programmed to turn on and
off randomly (Variano and Cowen, 2008). Experiments
were first carried out to characterize the generated
turbulence. Then, a region in the tank was chosen such
that the particle plume experienced a roughly isotropic
and homogeneous turbulent background with mean root-
mean-square (rms) velocity [urms2]1/2 of 1.50.30 cm/s. A
particle plume of initial diameter D = 1.0 cm and constant
efflux velocity was generated by releasing a fixed mass
(600 g) of wet glass beads (by gravity) underwater using
a submerged-hourglass release mechanism. Particle
density was 2500 kg/m 3, and median diameters d50
ranged from 0.0675 0.725 mm, producing an estimated

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initial velocity of U o 2.2 31.8 cm/s. The steadiness of
the plume efflux velocity was checked by the time-and-
weight method (Chan, 2012) using different initial release
masses. The plume discharge parameters in this study are
shown in Table 1.
Experiments of particle plumes in a quiescent ambient
fluid were first carried out as reference cases. In this first
series of experiments, plumes of particle size A AH (see
Table 1) were released in sequence, and the resulting
plumes were recorded at 30 Hz using a video camera. A
spotlight was used to illuminate the flows against a dark
background to aid visualization. A second series of
experiments was conducted using exactly the same
discharge parameters as in the first series, but with the
addition of background turbulence. Details of generating
background turbulence are given in the next section. The
resulting plume flow under the effect of turbulence was
again video recorded. The captured videos were then
converted to a series of images for post-processing.
homogeneity, isotropicity, integral length scale, and the
mean flow of the turbulence.
3.1.1 Decay of the turbulence
It is expected that the turbulence intensity will reduce as
the distance from the jet array x increases. Figure 2 shows
the x rms velocity measured by using PIV at different
distances from the jet array. Best-fit of the data shows a
decay ~ x-1.94, somewhat faster than the reported decay of
~x-1.37 (Khorsandi et al., 2013) using similar apparatus; for
our region of interest where the plume measurements
were made (x > 150 cm), the rms velocity decay as ~ x-1.58 ,
which becomes closer to the reported decay. In our
particle plume experiments, the measurements were
made at 20820 cm from the jet array, with a rms velocity
of 1.50.30 cm/s.

Figure 1. Experimental setup in this study.

Figure 2. The decay of turbulence intensity as a function of
Table 1. Plume discharge parameters in this study distance from the jet array.

Particle 3.1.2 Homogeneity and isotropicity

d50 (mm) UO (cm/s) u rms(cm/s)
size
Homogeneity of the turbulence generated can also be
A 0.725 31.8 1.5
assessed from Figure 2. Different data at the same x
B 0.514 24.7 1.5
D 0.256 22.9 1.5 represent measurements made in different planes
AE 0.120 3.9 1.5 (perpendicular to x); it can be seen in general that the rms
AH 0.0675 2.2 1.5 velocity is within 20% of the best-fit decay curve.
The isotropicity of the background turbulence was also
3. EXPERIMENTAL RESULTS AND ANALYSIS assessed. Figure 3 shows the ratio of the rms velocity in
the x-direction (u), and that perpendicular to x (v), has a
3.1 Background turbulence generation mean of 1.18, which is considered sufficiently isotropic.

The background turbulence was generated using a

random jet array (Variano and Cowen, 2008). Each jet in
the array was programmed to have a random on time
with (mean, standard deviation) = (12 s, 4 s) and off time
(108 s, 36 s). A mixing time of 2 3 hours was allowed to
ensure the turbulence in the tank had reached the
equilibrium state. The turbulence flow field was
measured at different position of the tank using particle
image velocimetry (PIV) with 0.03 s between each frame.
Each data point represents an average of 7-minute
continuous data. The objectives of the measurement were
firstly to measure the decay of turbulence as a function of
distance from the jet nozzle, and secondly to check the

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Figure 3. The ratio of rms velocity along the jet direction and that
perpendicular to it at different x.
3.1.3 Mean flow
Ideal background turbulence should have a mean flow
close to zero. We have computed the mean flow for each
of the measurement made, and its ratio to the velocity
rms velocity (expressed in terms of turbulent kinetic
energy k) is shown in Figure 4. The average ratio of all
data is 0.24, which is considered better than
turbulence generated by an oscillating grid (see Variano
et al., 2004).
Figure 4. Ratio of mean flow to a measure of rms velocity at
different x.
3.1.4 Integral length scale
The integral length scale can be determined using the PIV
data. The spatial autocorrelation function of x rms
velocity is given in Figure 5. The integral length scale is
obtained by integrating the area under the curve, which
in our experiments is determined to be 11.0 cm.
Figure 5. Spatial autocorrelation function of x fluctuating velocity.
3.2 Particle Plume
3.2.1 Quiescent ambient
Time averaged images of particle plumes in quiescent
ambient with different selected particle size are shown in
Figure 6. Similar to a single-phase plume, the particle
plume spreads linearly as it descent, but with a spreading
rate depending noticeably on particle sizes. The
spreading rate z/x ranged from 0.06 (size A) 0.13 (size
AH) in this study, almost 40% different than that (0.1) of
a single-phase plume.
A simplified analysis can be made to determine the
spreading rate of a particle plume. With an assumed
particle concentration of 60% by volume as typically seen
in slurry flows (Hall et al., 2010), we can calculate the
density of the particle-water mixture m as 1560 kg/m 3. A
plume densimetric Froude number can be defined as:
uo
Fr
g[( a m ) / a ]D
If we consider the particle plume as an equivalent single-
phase plume, the only parameter governing the plume
spreading will be Fr.
Figure 6. Spreading of particle plume of different particle sizes.
Figure 7 shows the spreading rate as a function of Fr. It
can be seen the spreading rate increases as Fr increases. A
best-fit to the data gives the spreading rate () as:
0.0473Fr 0.136
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Figure 7. Spreading of particle plume as a function of plume
densimetric Froude number.
3.2.2 Background turbulence
With the addition of background turbulence, the particle
plumes were observed to behave rather differently than
in quiescent ambient. Depending on the plume velocity
relative to the rms velocity, the turbulence can have
different influences on the plume development. This is
depicted in Figure 8. When the plume velocity is much
higher than the turbulence rms velocity, as in the case of
size A and B, there were no obvious changes in plume
structure, but the spreading rate can be seen to noticeably
increase when compared with the corresponding case in
quiescent ambient (Figure 8a). As the plume velocity
decreases, the large scales in the turbulence exhibit a
greater influence on the plume, causing meandering in
addition to the enhanced spreading as in the case of size
D (Figure 8b). Finally when the plume velocity was
further decreased, the small scales of the turbulence had
an effect on the plume structure, causing the plume to
breakdown; this can be observed in size AE and AH
(Figure 8c).
Figure 8. Different level of influences by the background
turbulence [(a) Particle size A; (b) size D; (c) size AH].
The enhanced spreading rate due to the turbulence can be
determined by comparing the time-averaged images of
the plume with and without turbulence. The meandering
effect will also spread the plume in a time ensemble
averaging sense, but this is different from the enhanced
steady spreading and should be eliminated. During
image post-processing, the centerline of the plume was
determined from each image, and any deviation of the
centerline from x = 0 was corrected so that meandering
effects could be minimized. Figure 9 shows the time-
averaged images of selected particle size plume after
post-processing.
Figure 9. Spreading of particle plumes of different particle size in
a turbulent background
The enhanced spreading due to the turbulent background
was found to be on average 30% more than that in
quiescent ambient. Note that the cases (size AE, AH) in
which the plume was observed to breakdown was not
included.
Another important question is to determine the criteria
for the particle plume to breakdown. It can be seen in
Figure 10 that the plume of particle size AH has a sudden
increase of plume width at about 40 50 D; this indicates
a breakdown of the plume. We follow the argument of
Hunt (1994) to determine the plume breakdown point z c.
In order for a plume to breakdown (when the external
turbulent eddies can affect strongly the plume flow), it is
necessary for the eddy of size Le and characteristic
velocity ue to be comparable to the characteristic length
scale of the plume Lp and entrainment velocity u p.
Mathematically:
1 / 3
~ u e ~ (Le ) 1 / 3
1/ 3
u p ~ Bo zc [3]
Where Bo is the plume buoyancy flux, and is the
turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate of the
background turbulence. Note that Le ~Lp ~ zc if the
turbulence is to affect the plume structure. Substituting
this into Eq. [3]:
B
z c c1 1 / 2 ( )1 / 2
[4]
The proportionality constant c1 in Eq. [4] can be
determined as 0.25 using established plume theory (e.g.
Lee and Chu, 2003).
The constant c1 can also be determined experimentally by
knowing and the plume breakdown point. An
estimation of is given by Cowen and Variano (2008) as:
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 0.5(2 / 3k 2 ) 3 / 2
[5]
LL
where k is the turbulent kinetic energy and LL = 11.0 cm is
the integral length scale of the background turbulence.
The particle plume breakdown point in this study can be
determined by locating the position at which the plume
starts to expand abruptly when compared with a
quiescent ambient.
Figure 10. Difference in spreading with and without the effect of
turbulence (size AH).
Using the experiments of particle plumes of size AE and
AH (in which the plume was shown to breakdown), we
found that the constant c 1 is about 0.1, which is in the
same order as theoretically predicted. This suggests that
this can be a sound theory for plume breakdown
predictions. More experiments will be conducted in the
future to validate the plume breakdown criteria.
4. CONLUSIONS
A particle plume in a turbulent background has been
studied. A roughly isotropic and homogeneous
turbulence can be generated by a jet array with each jet
programmed to be turned on and off randomly. A
particle plume in quiescent ambient was found to behave
rather differently than a single-phase plume: most
noticeably its spreading rate was a function of its
densimetric Froude number Fr. A functional relationship
between Fr and the plume spreading rate has been
established using our experimental data. The effect of
background turbulence on a particle plume was also
studied. For plume velocity much higher than the
turbulence velocity fluctuation, an enhanced spreading
rate of 30% was observed; for stronger turbulence, the
plume begins to meander, and the plume eventually
breakdowns when an even stronger turbulence is
experienced. A plume breakdown criteria has been
derived using the argument of Hunt (1994), and provides
an order-of-magnitude estimate of the breakdown point
in our experiments. More experiments will be conducted
in the future to develop a better understanding of the
issues arising in this paper.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This research programme/project is funded by the
National Research Foundation (NRF), Prime Ministers
Office, Singapore under its Campus for Research
Excellence and Technological Enterprise (CREATE)
programme.
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