Fibre streaks are observed in experiments with fibre suspensions in a turbulent half-channel flow. The preferential concentration methods, most commonly used to quantify preferential particle concentration, are in one dimension found to be concentration dependent. Two different new streak quantification methods are evaluated, one based on Voronoi analysis and the other based on artificial particles with an assigned fixed width. The width of the particle streaks and a measure of the intensity of the streaks, i.e. streakiness, are sought. Both methods are based on the auto-correlation of a signal, generated by summing images in the direction of the streaks. Common for both methods is a severe concentration dependency, verified in experiments keeping the flow conditions constant while the (very dilute) concentration of fibres is altered. The fixed width method is shown to be the most suitable method, being more robust and less computationally expensive. By assuming the concentration dependence to be related to random noise, an expression is derived, which is shown to make the streak width and the streakiness independent of the concentration even at as low concentrations as 0.05 particles per pixel column in an image. The streakiness is obtained by applying an artificial particle width equal to 20 % of the streak width. This artificial particle width is in this study found to be large enough to smoothen the correlation without altering the streakiness nor the streak width. It is concluded that in order to make quantitative comparisons between different experiments or simulations, the evaluation has to be performed with care and be very well documented.
Aiming at turbulent measurements in opaque suspensions, a simplistic methodology for measuring the turbulent stresses with phase-contrast magnetic resonance velocimetry is described. The method relies on flow-compensated and flow-encoding protocols with the flow encoding gradient normal to the slice. The experimental data is compared with direct numerical simulations (DNS), both directly but also, more importantly, after spatial averaging of the DNS data that resembles the measurement and data treatment of the experimental data. The results show that the most important MRI data (streamwise velocity, streamwise variance and Reynolds shear stress) is reliable up to at least r¯=0.75'>r¯=0.75r¯=0.75 without any correction, paving the way for dearly needed turbulence and stress measurements in opaque suspensions.