Coherent turbulent structures in a rapid contraction

TL;DR

This study investigates the formation, alignment, and growth of coherent vortical structures in turbulent flow through a strong 16:1 contraction using volumetric measurements, revealing long, streamwise-aligned vortices that intensify and dominate near the outlet.

Contribution

It introduces quantitative measures for vortex alignment and characterizes vortex growth and prevalence in a high contraction ratio turbulent flow.

Findings

Vortices are strongly aligned with the mean flow.

Vortex length exceeds four times the entrance integral scale.

Vorticity strengthens by 65% along the contraction.

Abstract

The coherent vortical structures in turbulent flow through a strong 16:1 3-D contraction, are studied using time-resolved volumetric measurements. Visualization using vorticity magnitude criterion shows the emergence of long, stretched cylindrical vortices aligned with the mean flow. This alignment is quantified by PDFs of the direction cosines. We propose two measures to quantify the alignment, the peak height in the probability and a coefficient from the moment of the PDF, both of which reaffirm the strong streamwise alignment. The r.m.s. streamwise vorticty grows within the contraction to becoming 4.5 times larger than the transverse component, at the downstream location where the contraction ratio C=11. The characteristic vortices become as long as the measurement volume, or more than 4 times the integral scale at the entrance to the contraction. We also characterize the vorticity enhancement along individual vortices, measuring 65% strengthening over the distance where C goes from 4 to 11. The prevalence of these coherent structures is estimated from 700,000 measured volumes, showing that near the outlet it is more likely to have 1 or 2 of these structures present than none.