Turbulent Properties of Triple Elliptic Free Jets With Various Nozzle Orientation

Abstract

An experimental investigation of nozzle orientation effects on turbulent characteristics of elliptic triple free jets was carried out for three nozzle configurations. The first configuration had each nozzle oriented along the minor plane (3_Minor), the next had two nozzles oriented along the minor plane and one along the major plane (Min_Maj_Min) and the last configuration had one nozzle oriented along the minor plane and two along the major plane (Maj_Min_Maj). The experiments were conducted using modified contoured nozzles with a sharp linear contraction for a nozzle spacing ratio of 4.1d, a nozzle equivalent diameter of 9 mm, and Reynolds number of 10,000. Nozzle orientation effects on the mean velocity, turbulent intensity, and Reynolds shear stress were discussed. The velocity decay, jet spread, merging point (MP), combined point (CP), and potential core length were used to characterize the effects of nozzle orientation on the mixing performance. The 3_Minor configuration had shorter potential core length and closer MP location which are indicative of a faster mixing in the converging region. The early merging of 3_Minor led to higher levels of streamwise turbulent intensity. One-dimensional plots revealed that jets approached self-similarity at a faster rate in the major axis. The orientation of the middle jet was found to be a key factor in determining transverse diffusion of the Reynolds shear stress in the plane of observation. Two-point correlations were used to provide insight into the effects of nozzle orientation on the spatial coherence of the large-scale turbulence structure and integral length scale.