Testing an in-line digital holography ‘inverse method’ for the Lagrangian tracking of evaporating droplets in homogeneous nearly isotropic turbulence

An in-line digital holography technique is tested, the objective being to measure Lagrangian three-dimensional (3D) trajectories and the size evolution of droplets evaporating in high-Reλ strong turbulence. The experiment is performed in homogeneous, nearly isotropic turbulence (50 × 50 × 50 mm3) created by the meeting of six synthetic jets. The holograms of droplets are recorded with a single high-speed camera at frame rates of 1–3 kHz. While hologram time series are generally processed using a classical approach based on the Fresnel transform, we follow an ‘inverse problem’ approach leading to improved size and 3D position accuracy and both in-field and out-of-field detection. The reconstruction method is validated with 60 μm diameter water droplets released from a piezoelectric injector ‘on-demand’ and which do not appreciably evaporate in the sample volume. Lagrangian statistics on 1000 reconstructed tracks are presented. Although improved, uncertainty on the depth positions remains higher, as expected in in-line digital holography. An additional filter is used to reduce the effect of this uncertainty when calculating the droplet velocities and accelerations along this direction. The diameters measured along the trajectories remain constant within ±1.6%, thus indicating that accuracy on size is high enough for evaporation studies. The method is then tested with R114 freon droplets at an early stage of evaporation. The striking feature is the presence on each hologram of a thermal wake image, aligned with the relative velocity fluctuations ‘seen’ by the droplets (visualization of the Lagrangian fluid motion about the droplet). Its orientation compares rather well with that calculated by using a dynamical equation for describing the droplet motion. A decrease of size due to evaporation is measured for the droplet that remains longest in the turbulence domain.