Gioacchino Cafiero

Flow field topology of submerged jets with fractal generated turbulence

Fractal grids (FGs) have been recently an object of numerous investigations due to the interesting capability of generating turbulence at multiple scales, thus paving the way to tune mixing and scalar transport. The flow field topology of a turbulent air jet equipped with a square FG is investigated by means of planar and volumetric particle image velocimetry. The comparison with the well-known features of a round jet without turbulence generators is also presented. The Reynolds number based on the nozzle exit section diameter for all the experiments is set to about 15 000. It is demonstrated that the presence of the grid enhances the entrainment rate and, as a consequence, the scalar transfer of the jet. Moreover, due to the effect of the jet external shear layer on the wake shed by the grid bars, the turbulence production region past the grid is significantly shortened with respect to the documented behavior of fractal grids in free-shear conditions. The organization of the large coherent structures in the FG case is also analyzed and discussed. Differently from the well-known generation of toroidal vortices due to the growth of azimuthal disturbances within the jet shear layer, the fractal grid introduces cross-wise disturbs which produce streamwise vortices; these structures, although characterized by a lower energy content, have a deeper streamwise penetration than the ring vortices, thus enhancing the entrainment process.

Ensemble 3D PTV for high resolution turbulent statistics

A method to extract turbulent statistics from three-dimensional (3D) PIV measurements via ensemble averaging is presented. The proposed technique is a 3D extension of the ensemble particle tracking velocimetry methods, which consist in summing distributions of velocity vectors calculated on low image density samples and then extract the statistical moments from the velocity vectors within sub-volumes, with the size of the sub-volume depending on the desired number of particles and on the available number of snapshots. The extension to 3D measurements poses the additional difficulty of sparse velocity vectors distributions, thus requiring a large number of snapshots to achieve high resolution measurements with a sufficient degree of accuracy. At the current state, this hinders the achievement of single-voxel measurements, unless millions of samples are available. Consequently, one has to give up spatial resolution and live with still relatively large (if compared to the voxel) sub-volumes. This leads to the further problem of the possible occurrence of a residual mean velocity gradient within the sub-volumes, which significantly contaminates the computation of second order moments. In this work, we propose a method to reduce the residual gradient effect, allowing to reach high resolution even with relatively large interrogation spots, therefore still retrieving a large number of particles on which it is possible to calculate turbulent statistics. The method consists in applying a polynomial fit to the velocity distributions within each sub-volume trying to mimic the residual mean velocity gradient.

Effect of Fractal Endplates on the Wingtip Vortex

© 2018, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics Inc, AIAA. All rights reserved. An experimental investigation was performed on the effect of fractal endplates on the wingtip vortex of a NACA 0012 semi span wing at a Reynolds number of 2 × 105. The endplates were obtained by introducing three different fractal patterns. Constant temperature anemometry and stereoscopic particle image velocimetry were employed to assess both the local flow properties as well as the spatial organization of the wingtip vortex. The results show that the introduction of a fractal endplate strongly affects both the geometry and the turbulence features of the vortex. In particular, it is found that the fractal geometry weakens the vortex by spreading the turbulent kinetic energy over a broader range of frequencies. We relate this loss of coherence to a faster dissipation of the vortex, thus paving the way to the employment of fractal endplates to reduce the hazard associated to such flow features.

Blob-enhanced reconstruction technique

A method to enhance the quality of the tomographic reconstruction and, consequently, the 3D velocity measurement accuracy, is presented. The technique is based on integrating information on the objects to be reconstructed within the algebraic reconstruction process. A first guess intensity distribution is produced with a standard algebraic method, then the distribution is rebuilt as a sum of Gaussian blobs, based on location, intensity and size of agglomerates of light intensity surrounding local maxima. The blobs substitution regularizes the particle shape allowing a reduction of the particles discretization errors and of their elongation in the depth direction. The performances of the blob-enhanced reconstruction technique (BERT) are assessed with a 3D synthetic experiment. The results have been compared with those obtained by applying the standard camera simultaneous multiplicative reconstruction technique (CSMART) to the same volume. Several blob-enhanced reconstruction processes, both substituting the blobs at the end of the CSMART algorithm and during the iterations (i.e. using the blob-enhanced reconstruction as predictor for the following iterations), have been tested. The results confirm the enhancement in the velocity measurements accuracy, demonstrating a reduction of the bias error due to the ghost particles. The improvement is more remarkable at the largest tested seeding densities. Additionally, using the blobs distributions as a predictor enables further improvement of the convergence of the reconstruction algorithm, with the improvement being more considerable when substituting the blobs more than once during the process. The BERT process is also applied to multi resolution (MR) CSMART reconstructions, permitting simultaneously to achieve remarkable improvements in the flow field measurements and to benefit from the reduction in computational time due to the MR approach. Finally, BERT is also tested on experimental data, obtaining an increase of the signal-to-noise ratio in the reconstructed flow field and a higher value of the correlation factor in the velocity measurements with respect to the volume to which the particles are not replaced.

Flow Field Topology of Impinging Jets with Fractal Inserts

An experimental investigation of the flow field features of a round air jet equipped with a fractal (FG) and a regular (RG) grid insert impinging on a flat surface is carried out by means of 2D-2C Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV). The results are compared to those for a round jet without any grid (JWT). The test Reynolds number is set to 10,000. The average flow fields and the turbulent kinetic energy distributions are presented. In particular, the effect of the presence of the fractal grid on the turbulence intensity distribution and on the planar component of the Reynolds stress is analyzed. Some differences between the location of the maximum of the turbulence intensity profile and the data reported in the literature are found. A possible interaction process between the wakes of the grids and the growing shear layer of the jet might be responsible of this discrepancy. A comparison between the flow field and the heat transfer results obtained by the authors in a previous work is also carried out. What is underlined is that both an higher turbulence level and a much stronger axial velocity cause an increment in the heat transfer rate.