Numerical investigation of thermal-mixing characteristics at vertically oriented T-junction pipelines

Abstract

When hot and cold fluids are mixed at pipeline tees, temperature fluctuations are generated and can lead to thermal fatigue damage in the piping materials. At the University of Stuttgart in Germany, experimental investigations have been performed for understanding the flow mixing mechanism causing thermal fatigue. It was found that the inlet flow rate is one of the decisive factors on the mixing behaviors at a horizontal T-junction.In this study, the influence of the inlet flow rate on the flow mixing behaviors at the vertical T-junction is investigated using the large-eddy simulation (LES) method. The simulations are validated with the previous experiments and provide a good overview of the mixing flow. The LES method shows the advantage of illustrating the collision of two flow streams at the T-junction, which leads to different behaviors of the mixing flow. Generally, the temperature fluctuation in the mixing flow as well as the stability of thermal stratification decreases along the flow direction due to the dissipation of the turbulent kinetic energy in the mixing flow. The decrease in the main flow rate shows the impact of the increase in thermal stratification stability and the reverse flow distance. The decrease in the branch flow leads to a slight increase of the thermal stratification stability downstream of the T-junction and significant turbulent penetration in the branch pipe. The maximum temperature fluctuation at the pipeline inner surface is located at the joint position of the pipelines with a value higher than 30 K. Moreover, the flow collision at the T-junction leads to significant secondary flow in the mixing region, which can be influenced by the variations in the inlet flow rate. In particular, the secondary flow due to cold fluid presents a phenomenon of counter-rotating vortex pair (CRVP), and generates a temperature fluctuation with a frequency of approximately 1.1 Hz, which is recorded by the monitor points at both horizontal sides of the pipeline. In comparison with the previous work at the horizontal T-junction, the complete flow collision at the vertical T-junction is the reason for the totally different mixing phenomenon.