Experimental study of an impinging jet with different swirl rates

A stereo PIN technique using advanced pre- and post-processing algorithms is implemented for the experimental study of the local structure of turbulent swirling impinging jets. The main emphasis of the present work is the analysis of the influence of swirl rate on the flow structure. During measurements, the Reynolds number was 8900, the nozzle-to-plate distance was equal to three nozzle diameters and the swirl rate was varied from 0 to 1.0. For the studied flows, spatial distributions of the mean velocity and statistical moments (including triple moments) of turbulent pulsations were measured. The influence of the PIV finite spatial resolution on the measured dissipation rate and velocity moments was analyzed and compared with theoretical predictions. For this purpose, a special series of 2D PIN measurements was carried out with vector spacing up to several Kolmogorov lengthscales. All terms of the axial mean momentum and the turbulent kinetic energy budget equations were obtained for the cross-section located one nozzle diameter from the impinging plate. For the TKE budget, the dissipation term was directly calculated from the instantaneous velocity fields, thereby allowing the pressure diffusion term to be found as a residual one. It was found that the magnitude of pressure diffusion decreased with the growth of the swirl rate. In general, the studied swirling impinging jets had a greater spread rate and a more rapid decay in absolute velocity when compared to the non-swirling jet. (C) 2007 Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.