Heat Transfer Engineering, Vol.36, No.1, 43-57, 2015
Comparative Investigation on Heated Swirling Jets Using Experimental and Numerical Computations
The purpose of this paper is to investigate both experimentally and numerically the influence of various parameters on the different blowing configurations of multiple swirling jets. Flow rate was adjusted at Reynolds numbers ranging from 104 to 3 x 10(4). The current study is carried out under uniform heat flux condition for each diffuser, at Reynolds number of 3x10(4), with air being the working fluid. Experiments concerning the fusion of several jets show that the resulting jet is clearly more homogenized under swirling influence. Afterward, numerical simulation is also carried out using the finite-volume computational fluid dynamics solver FLUENT 6.3, in which the standard k - epsilon and the Reynolds stress turbulence model (RSM) were used for turbulence computations. The findings of this study show that the diffuser vane angle and a balance and an imbalance in temperature between the central and peripheral jets affect the quality of the thermal homogenization of the ambiance. Overall predictions obtained with the RSM model are in better agreement with the experimental data compared to those of the standard k - epsilon model.