  The settling process and wall impact of large spherical particles in a
stagnant, highly viscous fluid has been observed by means of high-speed shadow
imaging. The particles included in this study vary in size and material
properties: steel, polytetrafluorethylen (PTFE), polyoxymethylen (POM), or
rubber. The corresponding terminal Reynolds numbers range from 333 to 4012,
covering in principle the transitional and Newton regime for drag forces. For
collision studies, the Stokes number just before impact is also relevant, and
lies in the range 50 < St < 2250. The settling curves obtained experimentally
are compared with numerical and analytical solutions. The latter has been
derived on the basis of nominal terminal velocity and relaxation time for the
Stokes and Newton regimes. A deviation between experimental results and
analytical solution was observed in all cases where the terminal Reynolds
number is larger than 300 and smaller than 1100. In this flow regime, the
settling process of the spheres is already affected at a long distance from the
impact object, leading to an early but significant deceleration. Moreover, a
reduced settling velocity was observed along the whole trajectory for the PTFE
particles with the lowest terminal Reynolds number. All processed datasets are
available via the Mendeley Data repository. Two additional effects have been
observed during this study. First, a bright region was detected around all PTFE
spheres. It finally was found to be due to total light reflection around the
sphere, but, to the best of our knowledge, this peculiarity has never been
reported before. Being purely optical, this does not effect the settling
behavior for PTFE. On the other hand, partial absorption of liquid at the
particle surface was observed for rubber, leading to a reduced sedimentation
velocity.
