Surface Discharges of Buoyant Jets in Crossflows

Abstract

Understanding the physics of mixing for two fluids is a complicated problem and has always been an interesting phenomenon to study. Surface discharge is the oldest, least expensive and simplest way of discharging industrial or domestic wastewater into rivers and estuaries. Because of the lower degree of dilution in surface discharges, critical conditions are more likely to occur. Having a better understanding of the mixing phenomenon in these cases will help to predict the environmental effects more accurately. In this study, surface discharges of jets into waterbodies with or without crossflows were investigated numerically and experimentally. Three-dimensional (3-D) Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) models were developed for studying the surface discharge of jets into water bodies using different turbulence models. Reynolds stress turbulence models and spatially filtered Large Eddy Simulation (LES) were used in the numerical models. The effects of inclusion of free surface water in the CFD models on the performance of the numerical model results were investigated. Numerical model results were compared with the experimental data in the literature as well as the experimental works performed in this study. Experimental works for buoyant and non-buoyant surface discharge of jets into crossflow and stagnant water were conducted in this study. A new setup was designed and built in the Civil Engineering Hydraulics Laboratory at the University of Ottawa to perform the desired experiments. Stereoscopic Particle Image Velocimetry (Stereo-PIV) was used to measure the instantaneous spatial and temporal 3-D velocity distribution on several planes of measurement downstream of the jet with the frequency of 40 Hz. Averaged 3-D velocity distribution was extracted on different planes of measurement to show the transformation of the velocity vectors from a “jet-like” to a “plume-like” flow regime. Averaged 3-D velocity distribution and streamlines illustrated the flow transformation of the surface jets. Experimental results detected the formation and evolution of vortices in the surface jet’s flow structure over the measurement zone. Additional turbulent flow characteristics such as the turbulent kinetic energy (k), turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate (ϵ), and turbulent eddy viscosity (υt) were calculated using the measured time history of the 3-D velocity field.