Effects of turbulent eddies and Langmuir circulations on scalar transfer in a sheared wind-driven liquid flow

Abstract

The effects of turbulent eddies and Langmuir circulations in liquid flow on scalar transfer across a sheared wind-driven gas-liquid interface are investigated by means of a direct numerical simulation of a gas–liquid two-phase turbulent flow with a wind-driven nonbreaking wavy interface. The wind-driven wavy gas-liquid interface is captured using an arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian method with boundary-fitted coordinates on moving grids. The results show that Langmuir circulations are generated on the liquid side below the sheared wind-driven gas-liquid interface. The marker particles on the gas-liquid interface, the turbulent eddies in the form of streamwise vortices on the liquid side (i.e., the typical horseshoe vortices associated with bursting motions), and the low scalar flux lines on the gas-liquid interface induced by the turbulent eddies on the liquid side tend to locally concentrate in the regions along the downward flows caused by the Langmuir circulations. It is suggested that the turbulent eddies on the liquid side mainly control the scalar transfer across the sheared wind-driven gas-liquid interface, and the effect of the Langmuir circulations is relatively small.