PRACTICAL APPLICATIONS OF TURBULENCE

CHETHAN P BHAT KIRAN R MANJESH B NARENDRA N PAI SREEBHASH S KUTTY

(080922016) (080922018) (080922019) (080922022) (080930001)

INTRODUCTION
An important characteristic of turbulence is its ability to transport and mix fluid much more effectively than a comparable laminar flow The effectiveness of turbulence for transporting and mixing fluids is of prime importance in many applications Turbulence is also effective at 'mixing' the momentum of the fluid Compared with laminar flow, rates of heat and mass transfer at solid-fluid and liquid-gas interfaces are much enhanced in turbulent flows

The major motivation for the study of turbulent flows is the combination of the three preceding observations:
1. 2. 3.

The vast majority of flows is turbulent The transport and mixing of matter, momentum, and heat in flows is of great practical importance Turbulence greatly enhances the rates of these processes

AREAS OF APPLICATION
In the processing of liquids or gases with pumps, compressors, pipe lines The flows around vehicles - e.g., airplanes, automobiles, ships, and submarines The mixing of fuel and air in engines, boilers, and furnaces, and the mixing of the reactants in chemical reactors Pollutant streams released into the atmosphere or into bodies of water

The boundary layer in the earth's atmosphere Jet streams in the upper troposphere; cumulus clouds in motion The water currents below the surface of the oceans Gulf Stream is a turbulent wall-jet kind of flow The photosphere of the sun and the photospheres of similar stars are in turbulent motion Interstellar gas clouds (gaseous nebulae), the wake of the earth in the solar wind

Chemical engineers use turbulence to mix and homogenize fluid mixtures and to accelerate chemical reaction rates in liquids or gases Turbulence increases heat transfer rates in machinery of all kinds The rates of transfer and mixing are several orders of magnitude greater than the rates due to molecular diffusion Used in flowmeters, heat exchangers and other devices The diffusivity of turbulence, which causes rapid mixing and increased rates of momentum, heat, and mass transfer, is another important feature of all turbulent flows.

It is the source of the resistance of flow in pipelines. it increases momentum transfer between winds and ocean currents The outstanding characteristic of turbulent motion is its ability to transport or mix momentum, kinetic energy, and contaminants such as heat, particles, and moisture. A new research has suggested that that turbulence plays a critical role in creating ripe conditions for the birth of planets, a notion that challenges the prevailing theory of planet formation. Which was before described by Gravitational instability. Without turbulence, the mixing of air and fuel in an automobile engine would not occur on useful time scales Heat transfer and combustion rates
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As a practical matter, turbulence plays an important role in technology and control phenomena such as weather and climate that have a large effect on human activities. Predictability of the Earths atmosphere . The transport and dispersion of heat, pollutants, and momentum in the atmosphere and oceans would be far weaker. The mixing of air and fuel in an automobile engine at proper intervals. Life as we know it would not be possible on Earth.

TURBULENT COMBUSTION

Combustion always takes place within a turbulent flow field for two reasons:
1. 2.

Turbulence increases the mixing process and enhances combustion and combustion releases heat Generates flow instability through gas expansion and buoyancy, thus enhancing the transition to turbulence

ROTAMETER

Float is sharp edged Effect of viscosity variation made insensitive by making flow over float turbulent

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HEAT EXCHANGERS
Turbulent flow have a higher heat transfer coefficient According to Seider Tata equation For laminar flow h Re1/3 For turbulent flow h Re0.8

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STABLY-STRATIFIED TURBULENCE
Example of real turbulent flow Naturally occuring in atmosphere, oceans etc A three-dimensional homogeneous turbulence submitted to a stable stratification This is no longer an isotropic turbulence ,which is a ideal turbulence Has important applications in meteorology and oceanography

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In the atmosphere, small-scale three-dimensional turbulence, produced by the breaking of lee waves behind the mountains or by convective storms, may find itself afterwards imbedded in a stably-stratified density field and collapse into quasi twodimensional turbulence. In the ocean, the interaction of gravity waves with three-dimensional turbulence involves various complex phenomena which contribute to the formation of the mixed layer and are responsible for vertical exchanges arising in this layer and at the level of the thermocline

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HORIZONTAL VORTICITY ISOSURFACES

The vertical mixing layers thus created cause a strong vertical dissipation which inhibits any important inverse energy cascade within the horizontal layers. A similar structure of quasi horizontal vortex sheets was found in experiments by Fincham, where a rake of vertical rods was towed through a horizontal stratified tank.

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ROTATING TURBULENCE
This has applications in geophysical flows as well as in engineering (turbomachinery) The turbulent characteristics of the flow in blade passages of radial pumps and compressor impellers determine the efficiency of these devices Turbulence is also of great importance for the cooling by the fluid inside the blades Effects in geophysical and astrophysical phenomena

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Galaxies look strikingly like the eddies which are observed in turbulent flows such as the mixing layer between two flows of different velocity, and are called the eddies of a turbulent universe The atmospheres of planets such as Jupiter and Saturn, the solar atmosphere or the Earths outer core are turbulent Small-scale turbulence in the atmosphere can be an obstacle towards the accuracy of astronomic observations, and observatory locations have to be chosen in consequence

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SEPARATED FLOWS TURBULENCE

Separated flows are very common in external aerodynamics of cars, trains, planes, ships or submarines Large-eddy simulation techniques are now able to handle these flows both statistically and from the coherent-vortex point of view Also encountered in hydraulics, thermo hydraulics of nuclear reactors, or internal aerodynamics of combustors (rocket solid-propergol boosters).

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The flow behind a two-dimensional backward-facing step is a prototype of separated flow Rotating back step is an interesting combination of rotation and separation A geophysical example of backstep in a shallow flow is given by the vortices shed in the Algerian current, which detach periodically from the recirculation region induced by surface Atlantic water passing through Gibraltar straight to the Mediterranean

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COMPRESSIBLE FLOWS
The development of hypersonic planes and bodies has boosted research on free shear or wall turbulent flows in supersonic or hypersonic conditions Compressible turbulence may be characterized by the nature of the instantaneous velocity field Compressibility inhibits the development of inflectional instabilities

In many supersonic situations without heat sources, it may be expected that the divergence free approximation will be good enough to describe the turbulence of the shear flows In supersonic flows, many studies have been devoted to shock/boundary layer interactions The study of shock/boundary layer interactions is a must for external aerodynamics

VORTEX FLOW METERS

Vortex flow meters uses the principle of vortex shedding The vortex shedding results in pressure and velocity changes around and downstream of the vortex element Placing pressure, thermal or ultrasound detectors in a location where signal is high the vortex shedding frequency is measured

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CONCLUSION
A turbulent flow is unpredictable Is by nature unstable Is rotational i.e. their vorticity is non zero Turbulent flows always occur when the Reynolds number is large Turbulence also has undesirable consequences It increases energy consumption of pipelines, aircraft, ships, and automobiles and is an aspect to be reckoned with in air-travel safety, and it distorts the propagation of electromagnetic signals, and so forth

A major goal of a turbulence practitioner is the prediction and control of the effects of turbulence in various applications such as industrial mixers and burners, nuclear reactors, aircraft intakes, around ships, and inside of rocket nozzles A major goal of a physicist working in turbulence is to understand the dynamical origin of this complexity, describe and quantify its features, and understand the universal properties embedded in features that are specific to a flow

A larger goal is to understand whether the statistical complexity of turbulence is shared in a serious way by other phenomena such as granular flows, fractures, and earthquakes

REFERENCES
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Turbulence in Fluids, MARCEL LESIEUR, Springer An Informal Introduction to Turbulence, ARKADY TSINOBER, Kluwer Academic Publishers

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