Elisabeth Franks

Elisabeth is based in the Department of Engineering, under the supervision of Dr Shaun Fitzgerald. Her research topic is 'Flow Pulsation for Marine Cloud Brightening Applications'.

The aim of the project is to explore whether the introduction of controlled perturbations to a flow of water can reduce the range in size of droplets which are produced from a nozzle for the purpose of marine cloud brightening. Initial numerical modelling results indicate that the introduction of a pulsing pressure system can help create a more uniform distribution of droplet sizes for some droplet generation techniques. However, this needs to be tested experimentally and if the scheme is found to be positive then it will be necessary to understand how the droplet size range depends on frequency, frequency combinations, magnitudes of perturbation, and the type of pulsing introduced (e.g. acoustic, physical oscillation of nozzle, vibrating rod in liquid reservoir).