Large eddy simulation predictions of absolutely unstable round hot jet

Abstract

The paper presents a novel view on the absolute instability phenomenon in heated variable density round jets. As known from literature the global instability mechanism in low density jets is released when the density ratio is lower than a certain critical value. The existence of the global modes was confirmed by an experimental evidence in both hot and air-helium jets. However, some differences in both globally unstable flows were observed concerning, among others, a level of the critical density ratio. The research is performed using the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) method with a high-order numerical code. An analysis of the LES results revealed that the inlet conditions for the velocity and density distributions at the nozzle exit influence significantly the critical density ratio and the global mode frequency. Two inlet velocity profiles were analyzed, i.e., the hyperbolic tangent and the Blasius profiles. It was shown that using the Blasius velocity profile and the uniform density distribution led to a significantly better agreement with the universal scaling law for global mode frequency.