Effects of Schmidt number on near-wall turbulent mass transfer in pipe flow

Abstract

Large Eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent mass transfer in circular-pipe flow has been performed to investigate the characteristics of turbulent mass transfer in the near-wall region. We consider a fully-developed turbulent pipe flow with a constant wall concentration. The Reynolds number under consideration is Re τ = 500 based on the friction velocity and the pipe radius, and the selected Schmidt numbers (Sc) are 0.71, 5, 10, 20 and 100. Dynamic subgrid-scale (SGS) models for the turbulent SGS stresses and turbulent mass fluxes were employed to close the governing equations. The current paper reports a comprehensive characterization of turbulent mass transfer in circular-pipe flow, focusing on its near-wall characteristics and Sc dependency. We start with mean fields by presenting mean velocity and concentration profiles, mean Sherwood numbers and mean mass transfer coefficients for the selected values of the parameters. After that, we present the characteristics of fluctuations including root-mean-square (rms) profiles of velocity, concentration, and mass transfer coefficient fluctuations. Turbulent mass fluxes and correlations between velocity and concentration fluctuations are also discussed. The near-wall behaviour of turbulent diffusivity and turbulent Schmidt number is shown, and other authors’ correlations on their limiting behaviour towards the pipe wall are evaluated based on our LES results. The intermittent characteristics of turbulent mass transfer in pipe flow are depicted by probability density functions (pdf) of velocity and concentration fluctuations; joint pdfs between them are also presented. Instantaneous snapshots of velocity and concentration fluctuations are shown to supplement our discussion on the turbulence statistics. Finally, we report the results of octant analysis and budget calculation of concentration variance to clarify Sc-dependency of the correlation between near-wall turbulence structures and concentration fluctuation in the vicinity of the pipe wall.