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Dynamics of buoyancy-driven flows at moderately high Atwood numbers

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  14 April 2016

Bhanesh Akula  and
Devesh Ranjan
Bhanesh Akula
Affiliation:
Department of Mechanical Engineering, Texas A&M University, 3123 TAMU, College Station, TX 77843-3123, USA
Devesh Ranjan*
Affiliation:
George W. Woodruff School of Mechanical Engineering, Georgia Institute of Technology, 801 Ferst Drive, Atlanta, GA 30332-0405, USA
*
†Email address for correspondence: [email protected]
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Abstract

Simultaneous density and velocity turbulence statistics for Rayleigh–Taylor-driven flows at a moderately high Atwood number ($A_{t}$) of $0.73\pm 0.02$ are obtained using a new convective type or statistically steady gas tunnel facility. Air and air–helium mixture are used as working fluids to create a density difference in this facility, with a thin splitter plate separating the two streams flowing parallel to each other at the same velocity ($U=3~\text{m}~\text{s}^{-1}$). At the end of the splitter plate, the two miscible fluids are allowed to mix and the instability develops. Visualization and Mie-scattering techniques are used to obtain structure shape, volume fraction profile and mixing height growth information. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) and hot-wire techniques are used to measure planar and point-wise velocity statistics in the developing mixing layer. Asymmetry is evident in the flow field from the Mie-scattering images, with the spike side showing a more gradual decline in volume fraction than the bubble side. The spike side of the mixing layer grows 50 % faster than the bubble side. PIV is implemented for the first time in these moderately high-Atwood-number experiments ($A_{t}>0.1$) to obtain root-mean-square velocities, anisotropy tensor components and Reynolds stresses across the mixing layer. Overall, the turbulence statistics measured have shown different scaling compared to small-Atwood-number experiments. However, the total probability density functions for the velocities and turbulent mass fluxes exhibit behaviour similar to small-Atwood-number experiments. Conditional statistics reveal different values for turbulence statistics for spikes and bubbles, unlike small-Atwood-number experiments.

JFM classification

Convection: Buoyancy-driven instability Instability: Nonlinear instability Mixing: Turbulent mixing
Type
Papers
Information
Journal of Fluid Mechanics , Volume 795 , 25 May 2016 , pp. 313 - 355
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© 2016 Cambridge University Press 

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