Experimental investigation of a free-surface turbulent jet with Coanda effect

Abstract

The deviation of a jet from the straight direction due to the presence of a lateral wall is investigated from the experimental point of view. This flow condition is known as Coanda jet (from the Romanian aerodynamicist Henry Marie Coanda who discovered and applied it at the beginning of XXth century) or offset jet. The objective of the work is to detail the underlying mechanisms of such a phenomenon aiming to use it as a flow control method at polluted river flows mouth. To do this, a large laboratory free-surface tank with an incoming channel has been set up and velocity field measurements are performed by Optical Flow methods (namely Feature Tracking). Preliminary tests on the well-known free jet configuration without any marine structure (i.e. lateral wall) are performed to allow comparison with free jet scaling and self-similar solutions. The presence of the free-surface gives rise to centerline velocity decay which is lower than in free unbounded plane or circular jets due to the vertically limited ambient fluid entrainment. In the second part of the paper, the effect of a lateral wall on the jet configuration is examined by placing it at different lateral distances from the jet outlet. The resulting velocity fields clearly show an inclined Coanda jet with details which seems to depend on the lateral wall distance itself. The analysis of self-similarity along the inclined jet direction reveals that for wall distances larger than 5 jet widths this dependence almost disappears.