Modeling contaminant spread in the wake of moving notional geometries

Particles are released and deposited behind moving objects as they move through an environment due to their trailing wake. These deposited particles create contamination fields in an environment. For human exploration of pristine environments, mapping this contamination spread provides a way to understand and characterize human impact. This work aims to create an experiment-informed, scalable model that maps the particle setting from these trailing wakes, characterizing the contamination spread in various environments and atmospheric conditions. Preliminary small-scale testing utilized an airbrush as a notional contamination source to emit paint droplets, which settled onto the surface below in a characteristic pattern. Moving source experiments were conducted to determine the effect of complex wake profiles on the deposition pattern in comparison to stationary source experiments. Image process techniques determined the paint deposition pattern under different experimental conditions, creating paint concentration graphs. These graphs were nondimensionalized using key known nondimensional numbers identified with Buckingham Pi Theorem.