Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

Sprays are dynamic collections of droplets in gas that can be made by ejecting liquid at a very high speeds into a gas where it “atomizes”, i.e., breaks down to tiny droplets. Sprays are employed to distribute materials over surfaces in industry (coating, cleaning) and agriculture (watering, delivery of nutrients, pesticides, insecticides), and are also used to disperse and mix liquids with gases, with applications in combustion, mining, fire protection, waste treatment, chemical, pharmaceutical, and food industries. If your car runs on gasoline or diesel fuel, your car engine efficiency is determined by the atomization of the fuel in the combustion chamber. Sprays are also omnipresent in nature. Supercooled suspensions of water droplets in air, freezing rains, freeze upon impact with any surface, causing significant economic damage: the largest natural disaster in Canada was the Ice Storm of 1998, with $6 billion in damages and 120,000km of power lines downed due to excessive ice accumulation caused by freezing rains. These rains also cause damage on the seas and in the skies: they are extremely dangerous to aircraft due to rapid ice formation on aircraft surfaces. Many of sprays' properties are not well-understood because they can be quite difficult to measure. This project proposes new measurement techniques to study sprays using Magnetic Resonance Imaging (MRI), a modality commonly employed in clinics. MRI is a very powerful diagnostic tool due to its flexibility; you can make it sensitive to a wide range of chemical and physical parameters. Regular optical techniques use light to study sprays. This works well for well-separated droplets but fails close to the nozzle due to high amounts of liquid, and does not work at all inside spray nozzles because they are not transparent. MRI does not need a sample to be transparent because its signal comes directly from the sample bulk. We will develop new MRI sensitization techniques to study atomization processes and flows inside nozzles. The results, via a collaboration with spray technology experts, will lead to a better understanding of spray phenomena and more efficient uses of sprays. MRI will also be used to get a better understanding of freezing rains. Optical techniques are inefficient in measuring supercooled droplets' temperature and discriminating between frozen and unfrozen droplets. MRI signal, on the other hand, virtually disappears when water turns to ice and can also be sensitized to temperature changes and droplet speeds. These results will be useful for testing equipment to fight freezing rain on the ground, and in-flight icing hazards in aviation. Working on the project, students will gain useful research experience. Their skills in developing novel experimental approaches and designing new MRI techniques will be in demand in wide areas of Magnetic Resonance Imaging and materials science.