A study of the flow-field evolution and mixing in a planar turbulent jet using direct numerical simulation

By S. Stanley, Sutanu Sarkar, Juan Pedro Mellado. Journal of Fluid Mechanics, 2002

236 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Turbulent plane jets are prototypical free shear flows of practical interest in propulsion, combustion and environmental flows. While considerable experimental research has been performed on planar jets, very few computational studies exist. To the authors' knowledge, this is the first computational study of spatially evolving three-dimensional planar turbulent jets utilizing direct numerical simulation. Jet growth rates as well as the mean velocity, mean scalar and Reynolds stress profiles compare well with experimental data. Coherency spectra, vorticity visualization and autospectra are obtained to identify inferred structures. The development of the initial shear layer instability, as well as the evolution into the jet column mode downstream is captured well. The large- and small-scale anisotropies in the jet are discussed in detail. It is shown that, while the large scales in the flow field adjust slowly to variations in the local mean velocity gradients, the small scales adjust rapidly. Near the centreline of the jet, the small scales of turbulence are more isotropic. The mixing process is studied through analysis of the probability density functions of a passive scalar. Immediately after the rollup of vortical structures in the shear layers, the mixing process is dominated by large-scale engulfing of fluid. However, small-scale mixing dominates further downstream in the turbulent core of the self-similar region of the jet and a change from non-marching to marching PDFs is observed. Near the jet edges, the effects of large-scale engulfing of coflow fluid continue to influence the PDFs and non-marching type behaviour is observed.

Subfields: Aerospace Engineering, Computational Mechanics

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/55cf6d5a3afe921bea9dba2d3719030db036d356

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Citations in the corpus

Three-dimensional direct numerical simulation of a turbulent lifted hydrogen jet flame in heated coflow: flame stabilization and structure (2009, background): “Note also that compared to the non-reacting jet studied by Stanley et al. (2002), Ũ0 in the present reacting turbulent jet decreases minimally.”
Efficient Generation of Initial- and Inflow-Conditions for Transient Turbulent Flows in Arbitrary Geometries (2005, methodology): “This method was tested in simulations by [13, 12, 21 ] and others.”
Turbulence and energy budget in a self-preserving round jet: direct evaluation using large eddy simulation (2009, methodology): “Direct numerical simulation (DNS) can be used for flows at low Reynolds numbers, as successfully shown for instance by Mansour, Kim & Moin (1988) for a turbulent channel flow, and by Boersma, Brethouwer & Nieuwstadt (1998) and Stanley, Sarkar & Mellado (2002) for round and planar jets.”