Home

Encyclopedia
Journals
o Frontiers in Heat and Mass Transfer (FHMT)
o Frontiers in Heat Pipes (FHP)
e-Books
e-Resources
Jobs
o Browse by Category
Academic
Industry
Administrator/Management
Consulting
Post-Docs
Graduate Students
o Post a New Job
Events
o Browse by Category
Conferences
Workshops
Seminars
Courses
User Conferences
Online Events
o Post a New Event
News
o Latest News
o Thermal Digest
Who's Who
Links
o Books Guide
o Journals Guide
o Commercial Codes
o Government Agencies
o Major Awards
o Professional Societies
o Pictures & Movies

Home Encyclopedia Index Time-averaged_governing_equations_for_turbulence

Time-averaged governing equations for

turbulence
Contents
[hide]

1 Approaches
2 Continuity Equation
3 Momentum equation
4 Energy Equation
5 Species
6 Turbulence Kinetic Energy Equation
7 Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS)
8 References
9 Further Reading
10 External Links

Approaches
The transport phenomena equations including the Navier-Stokes and the energy equation are
exact for solving the turbulent problem if their complete unsteady forms are solved. In general,
this approach is not taken because of complexity and significant computer time requirement. In
addition, the turbulent problems, in their gross aspect, are assumed steady state as noted in the
previous subsection.

Time averaging of transport phenomena equations should provide the net effect of the turbulent
perturbation. For an incompressible binary system with constant properties, the continuity,
Navier-Stokes, energy, and conservation of mass species equations in a Cartesian coordinate
system are
Since we made no assumption about the nature of the flow in the above equations, the local
instantaneous parameters in a turbulent flow satisfy eqs. (1) (6). However, applying the above
equations to turbulent flow will require very fine grid size to be able to capture the detailed flow
structure within each eddy which is very challenging and, in most cases, unnecessary. For most
practical engineers, the mean values of various parameters in a turbulent flow are of interest.
Therefore, we will obtain the governing equations in term of time-averaged parameters. For
turbulent flow, the velocity components, pressure, temperature and mass fraction of species can
be expressed as sums of their mean values and fluctuations

Continuity Equation
Substituting the above equations into the continuity equation (1), one obtains:

By taking time averaging of eq. (7), we have

Considering eq. , the continuity equation

(8) becomes

which is the continuity equation in terms of time averaged velocity. It can be seen that it has the
exactly same form as that in terms of local instantaneous velocity, eq. (1). In other words, the
contributions of the fluctuations of velocity components are averaged out during the time
averaging.

Momentum equation
Similarly, substituting
into the momentum equation (2) in the x-direction and taking time average, one obtains

Considering eq. , the momentum equation

in the x-direction becomes:

where fluctuation components only appear in the last parenthesis on the right-hand side. In order
to simplify the terms that contain fluctuation component, the continuity equation (1) is multiplied
by u, i.e.,

Substituting eqs. , and

from Description
of turbulence into the above equation and performing time averaging to the resultant equation,
we have:
which can be simplified to

Considering the continuity equation in terms of mean velocity component, eq. (9), the above
equation is further simplified to:

Substituting the eq. (12) to eq. (11), the momentum equation in the x-direction becomes

By following the same procedure, the momentum equations in the y- and z-directions become:

It can be seen from eqs. (13) (15) that extra terms associated with the fluctuations of the
velocity components appeared in the momentum equations. These extra terms account for the
momentum transfer caused by the velocity fluctuations and are termed as turbulent or Reynolds
stress terms. The difference between the viscous stress and Reynolds stress is that the former
occurs at the molecular scale whereas the latter is caused by the interaction between eddies.

Energy Equation
To obtain the energy equation in terms of mean values of various variables, the following
equations:
are substituted into the energy equation (5) and time averaging is performed to the resultant
equations to obtain

Considering eq. , the energy equation

becomes:

By following the similar procedure that eq. (12) was derived, the following equation can be
obtained (see Problem 2.60):

Substituting the above equation into eq. (17), the energy equation becomes
Species
By following the same procedure, the conservation of species mass can be expressed as (see
Problem 2.61)

Turbulence Kinetic Energy Equation

Therefore, transport phenomena in turbulent flow of a binary system with constant properties can
be described by continuity equation (9), momentum equations (13) (15), energy equation (19),
and conservation of mass species equation (20). There are six time-averaged unknowns,
and 12 products of their fluctuations in these six equations. To use
these equations to solve turbulent transport phenomena, an appropriate turbulent model must be
employed to express the partial derivatives of the time-averaged product of the fluctuations in
terms of mean values of various variables. While many turbulent models are almost entirely
empirical, some models based on additional partial differential equations can be used to describe
these terms. Although the empiricisms cannot be completely eliminated, these extra equations
will allow us to introduce the empiricisms in a logical manner. We will show below the
derivation of the turbulence kinetic energy equation, which is one of the most widely used
additional equations.

Substituting eqs. , and

into eq. (2) and
multiplying u' to the resultant equation yield:

which can be time averaged to get

The above equation can be rearranged to

In order to further simplify eq. (21), the last term on the left hand side can be rewritten as

It can be shown that the second term in the above equation is zero by multiplying u'2 to the
continuity equation (1) and time averaging (See Problem 2.62). Thus, eq. (21) becomes

By multiplying v' to the momentum equation (3) and performing time averaging, the following
equation can be obtained:

Similarly, the following equation can be obtained by multiplying w' to the momentum equation
(4) and performing time averaging:
Adding eqs. (22) to (24) and defining the kinetic energy associated with velocity fluctuation,

the following additional equation of K is obtained:

In eq. (26), the first term on the right hand side represents the rate of generation of turbulent
kinetic energy by the interaction of the Reynolds stress with the mean shear. In other words, this
term represents the shear production due to turbulence. This lowers the kinetic energy of the
mean field. The last three terms on the right-hand side represent the spatial transport of turbulent
kinetic energy. The first two terms represent the transport by turbulence, while the third term
represents viscous transport. Additional terms that need to be considered that are not included in
this equation include buoyant production and viscous dissipation terms. Buoyant generation of
turbulent kinetic energy lowers the potential energy of the mean field. On the contrary, buoyant
destruction of turbulent energy increases the potential of the mean field. This is in contrast to the
shear generation of turbulent kinetic energy, which lowers the kinetic energy of the mean field.
In order to use eq. (26) to determine the turbulence terms in the momentum equations (13)
(15), additional approximate relations will be needed to relate some terms to the time averaged
quantities.