Computational study of conjugate heat transfer in T-junctions

Abstract

In this work we focus on the numerical prediction of temperature fluctuations induced in solid materials through turbulent mixing processes. As test case we use the mixing of two streams of different temperature in a T-junction. Due to the turbulent mixing of the two streams temperature fluctuations occur which are also transferred to the solid walls in contact with the fluid. Such fluctuations in the solid material may lead to thermal fatigue and are therefore relevant for the lifetime management of components used in nuclear power plants (NPP). We investigate the mixing in T-junctions made of different materials and having different pipe wall thicknesses. The temperature difference between the streams in the main and side branch is set to 75 °C and the mass flow rate in the main pipe is three times larger than in the side branch. In a first step we perform a set of simulations by using different formulations of the large-eddy simulation (LES) subgrid scale model, i.e. classical Smagorinsky model and dynamic procedure, to identify the influence of the modeled subgrid scales on the simulation results. The comparison between available experimental data and the numerical results reveals a good agreement when using the dynamic procedure. In a second step we address the temperature fluctuations in the solid wall subject to the wall thickness. The influence of the wall thickness is represented as a damping effect on the temperature fluctuations in radial direction in the pipe material. This study shows the capability of LES to predict thermal fluctuations in turbulent mixing.