Combined hot-wire and PIV measurements of a swirling turbulent flow at the exit of a 90° pipe bend

Abstract

Measurements of turbulent swirling flow by means of hot-wire anemometry and stereoscopic particle image velocimetry were performed, 0.67 pipe diameters downstream a 90° pipe bend. The flow for a wide range of swirl numbers up to $$S=1.2$$ , based on the angular velocity of the pipe wall and bulk velocity, was investigated and compared to the non-swirling case. The limitations and advantages of using a single hot-wire probe in a highly complex flow field are investigated and discussed. The present paper makes available a unique database for a kind of flow that has been neglected in literature and which is believed to be useful for validation purposes for the computational fluid dynamics community.