Grant: Research Tools and Instruments - Category 1 (<$150,000)

The transport of a dispersed phase within fluid flow is of paramount importance in many engineering systems. In slurry pipelines in the oil sands industry, the transport of sand particles causes erosion wear, which results in downtime, maintenance costs and reliability issues. Furthermore, the coalescence of bitumen droplets in aqueous suspensions, occurring in slurry pipelines and froth flotation vessels, depends on the transport mechanism of droplets. Inadequate coalescence can lead to serious consequences, such as loss of profit and, much more importantly, environmental pollution as the uncoalesced bitumen droplets are ultimately routed to tailings ponds. Transport mechanisms also exist in the pharmaceutical industry where the efficiency of inhalation drug delivery systems depend on the mixing rate of inhaled gases through the human respiratory tract.To experimentally investigate the transport mechanisms in fluid flows, the rate of change of flow properties, such as the velocity of a dispersed phase or concentration of a certain gas, must be measured. This rate of change depends on the local change of the property in time and its advection by the fluid flow. Conventional measurement systems are not capable of measuring in both temporal and spatial domains, and therefore, measurement of the rate of change is not possible. Recent advancements in CMOS camera sensors, along with high repetition-rate lasers, have made it possible to attain spatial measurements of the flow field at high temporal frequencies. This proposal is intended to obtain a high repetition-rate laser for spatio-temporal measurement of velocity and concentration. This state-of-the-art system will place University of Alberta at the leading edge of turbulent transport and mixing research.