Reconstruction of film thickness time traces for wavy turbulent free falling films

The direct simulation of the hydrodynamics of falling films is a computationally difficult task. Especially in the case of wavy turbulent films the required effort is beyond the current computational capabilities. An alternative approach is to reduce the complexity of the problem using experimental information. In this spirit the present work focuses on the reconstruction of film thickness traces employing information acquired from experimental data. The reconstruction procedure for large waves is quite straightforward utilizing directly descriptive parameter distributions found from the analysis of experimental data. The rest of the film waves are reconstructed based on three criteria: their heights obey a “universal distribution”, their frequency is selected to match the experimental film thickness frequency and the overall film thickness time trace obeys a Weibull distribution. The final reconstruction algorithm is tested for wavy turbulent films over a broad range of Reynolds numbers with satisfactory results. Apart from efficient the code is robust and fast.