Characteristic Flow Phenomena on a Tee-Branch Pipe

摘要

This study focuses on flow phenomena in a tee-branch pipe. Although these kinds of flows exist in many fields such as piping systems in engineering plants, and blood vessel systems or their models in living bodies (ex. Osao et al., 2008), nature of the flows has not been fully reported. In this research the elemental nature of them has been investigated by experimental visualization. Consequently the following phenomena were found: 1) two cylinder-type cores are generated near the outside of the jet flow from the inlet pipe to induce pseudo-Karman vortices; 2) a pair of longitudinally spiral vortices is generated in each outlet pipe; and 3) interaction between the pseudo-Karman vortices and the paired longitudinal vortices causes wavering flows. The purpose of this paper is to show visualization of the characteristic phenomena on tee-branch pipe flows and discuss on their mechanism.