Numerical Investigations on Effect of Obstacle in an Incompressible Laminar Wall Jet Flow

Abstract

The effect of obstacle in an incompressible laminar wall jet flow is investigated numerically. Heat transfer enhancements in cooling of heated objects are found wide application in almost all fields of engineering. Wall jet cooling is one such important application. From literature survey in the related area it is found that the influence of the presence of obstacles in the flow path of laminar wall jet needs to be investigated. The objective of the present work is to study the effect of obstacle on flow characteristics of the incompressible laminar wall jet. The wall jet is blown along a horizontal bottom wall. The obstacle block is placed on the bottom wall. A two dimensional computational domain is considered. At the left side of the computational domain a vertical wall is present. The right and top of the domains are open to ambient fluid. An in-house code developed based on vorticity-stream function formulation for the full computational domain is used to solve the problem. The flow pattern, formation and growth of recirculation, attachment and re-attachment behaviors and the velocity profiles were studied with and without obstacle. From the results of the investigations, the influences of obstacle on flow characteristics of wall jet was found more at higher Reynolds numbers and at the regions nearer to the obstacle.