Study on the Shear Effect on Dye Patches Diffused in Wall-Bounded Shear Flow

This paper focuses on the high intensity filaments (dye patches) embedded in dye plumes in a wall-bounded shear flow, to investigate the shear effect on the dye patch distribution. Motivated by the widely concerned inverse estimation of the source location, we try extracting useful information to know the source location from down-stream dye patches. Accordingly, we changed the dye injection location at different distances from the wall and made observations at different downstream (diffusion) distances from the source. The orientation angle and roundness of dye patches were concerned to examine the shear effect and dye patch characteristics. To capture the dye plume images, a planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) technique was used. The orientation and roundness of each dye patch were calculated by least-square fitting. The statistics of both the orientation angle and the roundness were compared with those in homogeneous turbulent cases to reveal the shear effect. Different from uniformly-orientated dye patches in the homogeneous flow, larger occurrence probabilities with positive orientation angles of dye patches are observed in wall-bounded shear flow, in particular, when the injection location is near the wall. As with information extraction for the inverse estimation of source location, it is found that the orientation distribution of dye patches is independent of the diffusion distance, but related with the injection location from the wall. While for the homogeneous flow cases, a strong dependence on the diffusion distance is observed in the orientation distribution profiles. As for the roundness, similar aspects are found regarding the dependencies on the injection location in shear flow and on diffusion distance in homogeneous flow.

Diffusion Process of High Concentration Spikes in a Quasi-Homogeneous Turbulent Flow

When a mass spreads in a turbulent flow, areas with obviously high concentration of the mass compared with surrounding areas are formed by organized structures of turbulence. In this study, we extract the high concentration areas and investigate their diffusion process. For this purpose, a combination of Planar Laser Induced Fluorescence (PLIF) and Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) techniques was employed to obtain simultaneously the two fields of the concentration of injected dye and of the velocity in a water turbulent channel flow. With focusing on a quasi-homogeneous turbulence in the channel central region, a series of PLIF and PIV images were acquired at several different downstream positions. We applied a conditional sampling technique to the PLIF images to extract the high concentration areas, or spikes, and calculated the conditional-averaged statistics of the extracted areas such as length scale, mean concentration, and turbulent diffusion coefficient. We found that the averaged length scale was constant with downstream distance from the diffusion source and was smaller than integral scale of the turbulent eddies. The spanwise distribution of the mean concentration was basically Gaussian, and the spanwise width of the spikes increased linearly with downstream distance from the diffusion source. Moreover, the turbulent diffusion coefficient was found to increase in proportion to the spanwise distance from the source. These results reveal aspects different from those of regular mass diffusion and let us conclude that the diffusion process of the spikes differs from that of regular mass diffusion.

Inverse Source Locating Method Based on Graphical Analysis of Dye Plume Images in a Turbulent Flow

The inverse estimation of a source location of pollutant released into a turbulent flow is a probability problem instead of a deterministic one, as the turbulent flow is chaotic and irreversible. However, researches can be conducted to provide helpful instructions to the possible source location with corresponding uncertainty. This study aims to propose a method of inverse estimation of a passive-scalar source location. Experimental investigation of the dye plume characteristics released into a fully-developed turbulent flow is performed in a water channel. A planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) technique is used to obtain two-dimensional images of spreading dye plumes at a bulk Reynolds number of 20,000. The distributions of high concentration areas in the PLIF images are chosen as features that characterize the traveling (diffusion) distance or time from the dye source. Graphical analysis is used to extract these high concentration areas. The procedure of graphical analysis has three steps: 1) binarization using a threshold to extract high concentration dye patches;2) labeling individual high-concentration dye patches in the binarized images;and 3) pixel-counting to measure the area and perimeter of each dye patch. We examine the variations of fractal dimension of patches, and the fractal dimension is observed to be almost constant irrespective of the distance from the source. The kurtosis of the probability density function curve of the logarithm dimensionless dye patch areas is found to be related with the downstream diffusion distance, based on which an inverse estimation method to locate a passive-scalar point source is proposed and evaluated.

Analysis of High Concentration Spikes Appearing in Mass Plume in Nearly Homogeneous Turbulent Flow Based on the PDF Transport Equation

To evaluate the pollutant dispersion in background turbulent flows, most researches focus on statistical variation of concentrations or its fluctuations. However, those time-averaged quantities may be insufficient for risk assessment, because there emerge many high-intensity pollutant areas in the instantaneous concentration field. In this study, we tried to estimate the frequency of appearance of the high concentration areas in a turbulent flow based on the Probability Density Function (PDF) of concentration. The high concentration area was recognized by two conditions based on the concentration and the concentration gradient values. We considered that the estimation equation for the frequency of appearance of the recognized areas consisted of two terms based on each condition. In order to represent the two terms with physical quantities of velocity and concentration fields, simultaneous PIV (Particle Image Velocimetry) and PLIF (Planar Laser-Induced Fluorescence) measurement and PLIF time-serial measurement were performed in a quasi-homogeneous turbulent flow. According to the experimental results, one of the terms, related to the condition of the concentration, was found to be represented by the concentration PDF, while the other term, by the streamwise mean velocity and the integral length scale of the turbulent flow. Based on the results, we developed an estimation equation including the concentration PDF and the flow features of mean velocity and integral scale of turbulence. In the area where the concentration PDF was a Gaussian one, the difference between the frequencies of appearance estimated by the equation and calculated from the experimental data was within 25%, which showed good accuracy of our proposed estimation equation. Therefore, our proposed equation is feasible for estimating the frequency of appearance of high concentration areas in a limited area in turbulent mass diffusion.