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Dynamics of Gas Jet Impinging on Falling Liquid Films

par Mendez, Miguel Alfonso
Président du jury Colinet, Pierre
Promoteur Buchlin, Jean-Marie
Co-Promoteur Deconinck, Herman
Publication Non publié, 2018-05-07

Thèse de doctorat

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Résumé :

This thesis describes the unstable dynamics of a gas jet impinging on a falling liquid film. This flow configuration is encountered in the jet wiping process, used in continuous coating applications such as the hot-dip galvanizing to control the thickness of a liquid coat on a moving substrate. The interaction between these flows generates a non-uniform coating layer, of great concern for the quality of industrial products, and results from a complex coupling between the interface instabilities of the liquid film and the confinement-driven instabilities of the impinging jet.Combining experimental and numerical methods, this thesis studied the dynamics of these flows on three simplified flow configurations, designed to isolate the key features of their respective instabilities and to provide complementary information on their mutual interaction. These configurations include the gas jet impingement on a falling liquid film perturbed with controlled flow rate pulsation, the gas jet impingement on a solid interface reproducing stable and unstable liquid film interfaces and a laboratory scaled model of the jet wiping process. Each of these configurations was reproduced on dedicated experimental set-up, instrumented for non-intrusive measurement techniques such as High-Speed Flow Visualization (HSFV) and Time-resolved Particle Image Velocimetry (TR-PIV) for the gas jet flow analysis, Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF) tracking of the liquid interface, and 3D Light Absorption (LAbs) measurement of the liquid film thickness. To optimize the performances of these measurement techniques, several advanced data processing routines were developed, including a novel image pre-processing method for background removal in PIV and a dynamic feature tracking for the automatic detection of the jet flow and the liquid film interface from HSFV, LIF, and PIV videos.To identify the flow structures driving the unstable response of the jet flow, a novel data-driven modal decomposition was developed. This decomposition, referred to as Multiscale Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (mPOD), was validated on synthetic, numerical and experimental test cases and allowed for better feature extraction than classical alternatives such as Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD) or Dynamic Mode Decomposition (DMD).The experimental work on these laboratory models was complemented with the analysis of several numerical simulations, including a classical 2D Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier Stokes (URANS) modeling of the gas jet impingement on a fixed interface, a 2D Variational Multiscale Simulation (VMS) with anisotropic mesh refinement of the gas jet impingement on a pulsing interface, and a 3D simulation of the jet wiping process combining Large Eddy Simulation (LES) on the gas side with Volume of Fluid (VOF) treatment of the liquid film flow. The experimental modal analysis on the dynamic response of the gas jet and the characterization of the pressure-velocity coupling in the numerical investigation allowed for a complete picture of the mechanism driving the jet oscillation and its possible impact on the liquid film.In parallel, several flow control strategies to prevent the jet oscillation were developed, tested numerically and experimentally in simplified conditions, and later implemented on the design of a new nozzle for the jet wiping process. This new nozzle was finally tested on a laboratory scale of the wiping process and its performances compared to single jet and multiple jet wiping configurations. In these three cases, the experimental work presents the modal analysis of the gas field using TR-PIV and mPOD, the liquid interface tracking via LIF, and the final coating thickness characterization via LAbs.The large spatiotemporally resolved experimental database allowed to give a detailed description of the jet wiping instability and to provide new insights on this fascinating fundamental and applied problem of fluid dynamics.