Fractal analysis of turbulent mixing in fractal-generated turbulence by planar laser-induced fluorescence

Abstract

The fractal geometry of turbulent mixing of high-Schmidt-number scalars in multiscale, fractal-generated turbulence (FGT) is experimentally investigated. The difference between the fractal geometry in FGT and that in classical grid turbulence (CGT) generated by a biplane, single-scale grid is also investigated. Nondimensional concentration fields are measured by a planar laser-induced fluorescence technique whose accuracy has recently been improved by our research group, and the fractal dimensions are calculated by using the box-counting method. The mesh Reynolds number is 2500 for both CGT and FGT. The Schmidt number is about 2100. It is found that the threshold width ΔCth, when applying the box-counting method, does not affect the evaluation of the fractal dimension at large scales; therefore, the fractal dimensions at large scales have been investigated in this study. The results show that the fractal dimension in FGT is larger than that in CGT. In addition, the fractal dimension in FGT monotonically increases with the onset of time (or with the downstream direction), whereas that in CGT is almost constant with time. The investigation of the number of counted boxes in a unit area, together with the above results, suggests that turbulent mixing is more enhanced in FGT from the viewpoints of fractal geometry and expansion of the mixing interface.