Mosquitoes are vectors for some of the most devastating diseases on the planet. Given the centrality of acoustic sensing in the precopulatory behavior of these vectors, the use of an exogenous acoustic stimulus offers the potential of interfering with the courtship behavior of these insects. Previous research on the acoustotactic response of mosquitoes has been conducted on tethered preparations using low-intensity sound stimuli. To quantify differences in acoustotactic responses between mosquitos of distinct sex and species, we examined the effects of incidental sound stimuli on the flight behavior of free-flying male vs. female Aedes aegypti and Anopheles gambiae mosquitoes. The key variables were sound frequency (100–1000 Hz) and intensity (67–103 dB, measured at 12.5 cm from the source), and the acoustotactic response was measured in terms of the relative increase in flight speed in response to the stimulus. The data show, for the first time, significant sex- and species-specific differences in acoustotactic responses. A. aegypti exhibited a greater response to sound stimulus compared to An. gambiae, and the response also extended over a larger range of frequencies. Furthermore, the males of both species displayed a greater acoustotactic response than females, with An. gambiae females exhibiting minimal response to sound.

The radial relative velocity (RV) between particles suspended in turbulent flow plays a critical role in droplet collision and growth. We present a simple and accurate approach to RV measurement in isotropic turbulence-planar 4-frame particle tracking velocimetry-using routine PIV hardware. It improves particle positioning and pairing accuracy over the 2-frame holographic approach by de Jong et al. (2010) without using high-speed cameras and lasers as in Saw et al (2014). Homogeneous and isotropic turbulent flow ( = 357) in a new, fan-driven, truncated iscosahedron chamber was laden with either low-Stokes (mean = 0.09, standard deviation 0.05) or high-Stokes aerosols (mean = 3.46, standard deviation 0.57). For comparison, DNS was conducted under similar conditions ( = 398; = 0.10 and 3.00, respectively). Experimental RV probability density functions (PDF) and mean inward RV agree well with DNS. Mean inward RV increases with at small particle separations, , and decreases with at large , indicating the dominance of "path-history" and "inertial filtering" effects, respectively. However, at small the experimental mean inward RV trends higher than DNS, possibly due to the slight polydispersity of particles and finite light-sheet thickness in experiments. To confirm this interpretation, we performed numerical experiments and found that particle polydispersity increases mean inward RV at small , while finite laser thickness also overestimates mean inward RV at small , This study demonstrates the feasibility of accurately measuring RV using routine hardware and verifies, for the first time, the path-history and inertial filtering effects on particle-pair RV at large particle separations experimentally.2

Enclosed flow apparatuses with negligible mean flow are emerging as alternatives to wind tunnels for laboratory studies of homogeneous and isotropic turbulence (HIT) with or without aerosol particles, especially in experimental validation of Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS). It is desired that these flow apparatuses generate HIT at high Taylor-microscale Reynolds numbers ( λ R ) and enable accurate measurement of turbulence parameters including kinetic energy dissipation rate and thereby λ R . We have designed an enclosed, fan-driven, highly symmetric truncated-icosahedron 'soccer ball' airflow apparatus that enables particle imaging velocimetry (PIV) and other whole-field flow measurement techniques. To minimize gravity effect on inertial particles and improve isotropy, we chose fans instead of synthetic jets as flow actuators. We developed explicit relations between λ R and physical as well as operational parameters of enclosed HIT chambers. To experimentally characterize turbulence in this nearzero-mean flow chamber, we devised a new two-scale PIV approach utilizing two independent PIV systems to obtain both high resolution and large field of view. Velocity measurement results show that turbulence in the apparatus achieved high homogeneity and isotropy in a large central region (48 mm diameter) of the chamber. From PIV-measured velocity fields, we obtained turbulence dissipation rates and thereby λ R by using the second-order velocity structure function. A maximum λ R of 384 was achieved. Furthermore, experiments confirmed that the root mean square (RMS) velocity increases linearly with fan speed, and λ R increases with the square root of fan speed. Characterizing turbulence in such apparatus paves the way for further investigation of particle dynamics in particle-laden homogeneous and isotropic turbulence.

The effects of Reynolds number ( ) and Stokes number ( ) on particle-pair relative velocity (RV) were investigated systematically using a recently developed planar four-frame particle tracking technique in a novel homogeneous and isotropic turbulence chamber. We compare well at ≳ 10 , but were higher than both DNS and theory at ≲ 10 . For ≳ 1, 〈 − 〉 from all three matched well except for ≲ 10 , in which experimental values were higher, while 〈 2 〉 from experiment and DNS were much higher than theoretical predictions. We discuss potential causes of these discrepancies. What this study shows is the first experimental validation of and effect on inertial particle-pair 〈 − 〉 in homogeneous and isotropic turbulence.3

Computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is a promising tool to aid in clinical diagnoses of cardiovascular diseases. However, it uses assumptions that simplify the complexities of the real cardiovascular flow. Due to high-stakes in the clinical setting, it is critical to calculate the effect of these assumptions in the CFD simulation results. However, existing CFD validation approaches do not quantify error in the simulation results due to the CFD solver's modeling assumptions. Instead, they directly compare CFD simulation results against validation data. Thus, to quantify the accuracy of a CFD solver, we developed a validation methodology that calculates the CFD model error (arising from modeling assumptions). Our methodology identifies independent error sources in CFD and validation experiments, and calculates the model error by parsing out other sources of error inherent in simulation and experiments. To demonstrate the method, we simulated the flow field of a patient-specific intracranial aneurysm (IA) in the commercial CFD software star-ccm+. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) provided validation datasets for the flow field on two orthogonal planes. The average model error in the star-ccm+ solver was 5.63 ± 5.49% along the intersecting validation line of the orthogonal planes. Furthermore, we demonstrated that our validation method is superior to existing validation approaches by applying three representative existing validation techniques to our CFD and experimental dataset, and comparing the validation results. Our validation methodology offers a streamlined workflow to extract the "true" accuracy of a CFD solver.