Author(s)

Masaya Endo, Qianqian Shao, Takahiro Tsukahara, Yasuo Kawaguchi

Department of Mechanical Engineering, Tokyo University of Science, Chiba, Japan.

When a mass spreads in a turbulent flow, areas with obviously high concentration of the mass compared with surrounding areas are formed by organized structures of turbulence. In this study, we extract the high concentration areas and investigate their diffusion process. For this purpose, a combination of Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) and Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) techniques was employed to obtain simultaneously the two fields of the concentration of injected dye and of the velocity in a water turbulent channel flow. With focusing on a quasi-homogeneous turbulence in the channel central region, a series of PLIF and PIV images were acquired at several different downstream positions. We applied a conditional sampling technique to the PLIF images to extract the high concentration areas, or spikes, and calculated the conditional-averaged statistics of the extracted areas such as length scale, mean concentration, and turbulent diffusion coefficient. We found that the averaged length scale was constant with downstream distance from the diffusion source and was smaller than integral scale of the turbulent eddies. The spanwise distribution of the mean concentration was basically Gaussian, and the spanwise width of the spikes increased linearly with downstream distance from the diffusion source. Moreover, the turbulent diffusion coefficient was found to increase in proportion to the spanwise distance from the source. These results reveal aspects different from those of regular mass diffusion and let us conclude that the diffusion process of the spikes differs from that of regular mass diffusion.

Turbulent Transport, High Concentration Spikes, Quasi-Homogeneous Turbulent Flow, Conditional Sampling Technique, PIV and PLIF Measurements, Passive Scalar Diffusion

Endo, M. , Shao, Q. , Tsukahara, T. and Kawaguchi, Y. (2016) Diffusion Process of High Concentration Spikes in a Quasi-Homogeneous Turbulent Flow. Open Journal of Fluid Dynamics, 6, 371-390. doi: 10.4236/ojfd.2016.64028.