Transport of a passive scalar at a shear-free boundary in fully developed turbulent open channel flow

Direct numerical simulations of fully developed turbulence in an open channel geometry were performed in which a passive scalar was introduced. The simulations were intended to explore transport at free surfaces in two cases for which (1) the free surface was maintained at constant temperature and (2) the interfacial flux was fixed. These cases can be considered models for mass and evaporative heat transport where buoyancy and surface deformation effects are negligible. Significant differences were found in the thermal fields in these two cases. The turbulent statistics reveal that the surface flux in the constant temperature case was significantly more intermittent compared to the surface temperature field in the constant flux case. The surface temperature field in the latter case formed large patches of warm fluid, reminiscent of the so-called fish scale patterns revealed in recent infrared imagery of the air-water interface. The wake-like structure of the patches was evident despite the absence of surface shear. A model of surface renewal based on the existence of two disparate time scales (a fast hydrodynamic scale, and a slow, diffusional scale) was introduced to explain these differences in a heuristic manner. The model appears successful in explaining, in a qualitative sense, the surface thermal structure in each case. Correlations between the surface thermal fields (flux or temperature) and the subsurface hydrodynamics were also computed. A model based on the hypothesis that hairpin eddies are the dominant kinematic structure responsible for surface renewal is consistent with the correlations. However, these results cannot rule out the importance of other turbulent structures in free surface heat and mass transport processes. (C) 1999 American Institute of Physics. [S1070-6631(99)00309-8].