Published online by Cambridge University Press: 04 July 2016
Recent research into the fluid mechanics of hitting objects with air jets to eject unacceptable ones from a line of such particles in flight has shown the need for a better method of predicting the drag force involved since this is also the deflecting force in such an application. In most cases, the transverse dimensions of the jet are similar to, or smaller than, those of the target body so a drag force estimate based on infinite flow is likely to be seriously in error. Corrections are therefore needed to allow for jet diameters ranging from a fraction of the object’s size to many times that size. Achenbach investigated the blockage corrections for spheres in a closed circular wind tunnel but to the best of the authors’ knowledge no such results have been available for spheres in open jets, where the correction will in any case be of opposite sign.