Mixing in High Schmidt Number Turbulent Jets

Abstract

This thesis is an experimental investigation of the passive scalar (species concentration) field in the far-field of round, axisymmetric, high Schmidt number (liquid phase), turbulent jets issuing into a quiescent reservoir, by means of a quantitative laser-induced fluorescence technique. Single-point concentration measurements are made on the jet centerline, at axial locations from 100 to 305 nozzle diameters downstream, and Reynolds numbers of 3,000 to 102,000, yielding data with a resolved temporal dynamic range up to 2.5 x 10 to the 5th power, and capturing as many as 504 large-scale structure passages. Long-time statistics of the jet concentration are found to converge slowly. Between 100 and 300 large-scale structure passages are required to reduce the uncertainty in the mean to 1%, or so. The behavior of the jet varies with Reynolds number. The centerline concentration pdf's become taller and narrower with increasing Re, and the normalized concentration variances correspondingly decrease with Re. The concentration power spectra also evolve with Re. The behavior of the spectral slopes is examined. No constant -1 (Batchelor) spectral slope range is present. Rather, in the viscous region, the power spectra exhibit log-normal behavior, over a range of scales exceeding a factor of 40, in some cases.