Numerical and experimental investigation of turbulence and transport in mixing geometries
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Abstract
Turbulent mixing processes in three different flow configurations are studied using a combination of experimental data and computational fluid dynamics. The turbulent transport of a passive scalar in a wake and jet with co-flow in a rectangular reactor is studied using large eddy simulation and experimental data from particle image velocimetry (PIV), planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF), and simultaneous PIV/PLIF. In addition, the vortex flow in a four-inlet vortex reactor is studied by means of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes simulations and stereo-PIV. The investigations shed light on the flow features and mixing mechanisms of the flows and provide in-depth evaluation of the effect of simulation parameters and performance of the numerical methods.
This work shows that computational fluid dynamics in combination with PIV/PLIF data is an excellent tool to study mixing in the current flow configurations. Furthermore, this work demonstrates the value of in-depth evaluation of CFD methods.