Improved Prediction of Settling Behaviour of Solid Particles through Machine Learning Analysis of Experimental Retention Time Data

Abstract

The motion of particles through density-stratified interfaces is a common phenomenon in environmental and engineering applications. However, the mechanics of particle-stratification interactions in various combinations of particle and fluid properties are not well understood. This study presents a novel machine-learning (ML) approach to experimental data of inertial particles crossing a density-stratified interface. A simplified particle settling experiment was conducted to obtain a large number of particles and expand the parameter range, resulting in an unprecedented data set that has been shared as open data. Using ML, the study explores new correlations that collapse the data from this, and previous work Verso et al. (2019). The ``delay time,'' which is the time between the particle exiting the interfacial layer and reaching a steady-state velocity, is found to strongly depend on six dimensionless parameters formulated by ML feature selection. The data shows a correlation between the Reynolds and Froude numbers within the range of the experiments, and the best symbolic regression is based on the Froude number only. This experiment provides valuable insights into the behavior of inertial particles in stratified layers and highlights opportunities for future improvement in predicting their motion.

References in corpus (3)

• A scaling theory for the size distribution of emitted dust aerosols suggests climate models underestimate the size of the global dust cycle
• A computational framework for physics-informed symbolic regression with straightforward integration of domain knowledge
• Bouncing behaviour of a particle settling through a density transition layer