Experimental and Numerical Study of Laminar Round Jet Flows Along a Wall

Abstract

In the present study, both experimental and numerical techniques were employed to study three-dimensional laminar wall jet flows. The wall jet was created using a circular pipe of diameter 7×10−3 m and flows into an open water tank. The inlet Reynolds numbers based on the pipe diameter and jet exit velocity were 310 and 800. A particle image velocimetry (PIV) was used to conduct detailed measurements at various streamwise-transverse and streamwise-spanwise planes. The complete nonlinear incompressible Navier–Stokes equation was also solved using a collocated finite volume based in-house computational fluid dynamics (CFD) code. The computation was performed for three inlet Reynolds numbers, namely, 310, 420, and 800. From the PIV measurements and CFD results, velocity profiles and jet half-widths were extracted at selected downstream locations. It was observed that the numerical results are in reasonable agreement with the experimental data. The distributions of the velocities, jet spread rates, and vorticity were used to provide insight into the characteristics of three-dimensional laminar wall jet flows.