Vertical Plane Buoyant Jets in Stratified Environment

Abstract

A turbulence model is used to study the behavior of plane buoyant jets before the point of neutral buoyancy in stably linear stratified environments. The calculation of the center line velocity, density, turbulent kinetic energy, half‐width of buoyant jets, and the profiles of turbulent kinetic energy, turbulent dissipation function, turbulent shear stress and turbulent heat flux are made for a wide range of exit densimetric Froude numbers and ambient temperature stratifications. A unified scaling law is derived for normalization of these results. The correlation of the predicted results shows that the established zone of buoyant jet in the stably linear stratified environment may be divided into three regions: nonbuoyant region, intermediate region, and plume region. The variation of center line velocity, density and turbulent kinetic energy, and the spread of velocity half‐width along the axial line for both uniform and linearly stratified environments for a given exit densimetric Froude number is found to converge to a single curve under the unified scaling law. The profiles of mean velocity, mean temperature, and turbulent transport properties are given.