High-cycle thermal fatigue in mixing tees. Large-eddy simulations compared to a new validation experiment

ABSTRACT The present paper describes new experimental data of thermal mixing in a T-junction compared with results from Large-Eddy Simulations (LES) and Detached Eddy Simulations (DES). The experimental setup was designed in order to provide data suitable for validation of CFD-calculations. The data is obtained from temperature measurements with thermocouples located near the pipe wall, velocity measurements with Laser Doppler Velocimetry (LDV) as well as single-point concentration measurements with Laser Induced Fluorescence (LIF). The LES showed good agreement with the experimental data also when fairly coarse computational meshes were used. However, grid refinement studies revealed a fairly strong sensitivity to the grid resolution, and a simulation using a fine mesh with nearly 10 million cells significantly improved the results in the entire flow domain. The sensitivity to different unsteady inlet boundary conditions was however small, which shows that the strong large-scale instabilities that are present in the mixing region are triggered independent of the applied inlet perturbations. A shortcoming in the performed simulations is insufficient near-wall resolution, which resulted in poor predictions of the near-wall mean velocity profiles and the wall-shear stress. Simulations using DES improved the near-wall velocity predictions, but failed to predict the temperature fluctuations due to high levels of modeled turbulent viscosity that restrained the formation of small scale turbulence