QUANTITATIVE INVESTIGATION OF COHERENT STRUCTURES IN A FREE JET USING PIV AND POD

摘要

This paper investigates an isothermal free water jet discharging horizontally from a circular nozzle (9 mm) into a stationary body of water. The jet exit velocity was 2.5 m/s and the exit Reynolds number was 22,500. Particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements were made at the jet exit and in the far field of the jet. The large-scale structures in the far field were investigated by performing a proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) analysis on the fluctuating velocity fields. The number of modes used for the POD reconstruction of the velocity fields was selected to recover 40% of the turbulent kinetic energy. A vortex identification algorithm was then employed to quantify the size, circulation, and direction of rotation of the exposed vortices. Then, the identified vortex characteristics were analysed by performing a statistical study of their distributions.rnThe results clearly reveal that the jet contains a substantial number of eddies of both rotation directions. Moreover, the number of vortices decreases in the axial direction while their size increases. The mean circulation magnitude is preserved in the axial direction. The results indicate that larger vortices have a higher value of circulation while smaller values of circulation are associated with smaller eddies.