Under a Small Grant for Exploratory Research, an investigation will be conducted of species separation in a binary mixture. The species are smoke and air. Unusually rapid separation of smoke particles was observed in preliminary experiments in a vortex flow designed to study vortex breakdown. The process was much too rapid to be due to centrifugal separation, and is not explainable with conventional mechanisms. A further systematic exploration of the phenomenon, together with numerical particle path simulations, is to be carried out. A new mechanism for rapid species separation would be highly useful in separations technology for a broad range of engineering systems.
