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Much faster heat/mass than momentum transport in rotating Couette flows

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  11 February 2021

Geert Brethouwer*
Affiliation:
FLOW, Department of Engineering Mechanics, KTH, SE-100 44 Stockholm, Sweden
*
†Email address for correspondence: geert@mech.kth.se

Abstract

Heat and mass transport are generally closely correlated to momentum transport in shear flows. This so-called Reynolds analogy between advective heat or mass transport and momentum transport hinders efficiency improvements in engineering heat and mass transfer applications. I show through direct numerical simulations that in plane Couette and Taylor–Couette flow, rotation can strongly influence wall-to-wall passive tracer transport and make it much faster than momentum transport, clearly in violation of the Reynolds analogy. This difference between passive tracer transport, representative of heat/mass transport, and momentum transport is observed in steady flows with large counter-rotating vortices at low Reynolds numbers as well as in fully turbulent flows at higher Reynolds numbers. It is especially large near the neutral (Rayleigh's) stability limit. The rotation-induced Coriolis force strongly damps the streamwise/azimuthal velocity fluctuations when this limit is approached, while tracer fluctuations are much less affected. Accordingly, momentum transport is much more reduced than tracer transport, showing that the Coriolis force breaks the Reynolds analogy. At higher Reynolds numbers, this strong advective transport dissimilarity is accompanied by approximate limit cycle dynamics with intense low-frequency bursts of turbulence when approaching the neutral stability limit. The study demonstrates that simple body forces can cause clear dissimilarities between heat/mass and momentum transport in shear flows.

Information

Type
JFM Papers
Creative Commons
Creative Common License - CCCreative Common License - BY
This is an Open Access article, distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution licence (http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/), which permits unrestricted re-use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.
Copyright
© The Author(s), 2021. Published by Cambridge University Press.
Figure 0

Table 1. Domain size in the DNSs of TCF. $L_\theta$ is the azimuthal domain size at the centreline, and $L_z$ is the axial domain size.

Figure 1

Figure 1. (a) $Nu_m$ and (c) $Nu_h$ for PCF. (b) $Nu_m$ and (d) $Nu_h$ for TCF. Each line/colour represents a different constant $Re$, and dots denote DNS results. The horizontal dashed line marks $Nu_m,Nu_h =1$. Arrows show trends for increasing $Re$ listed in § 2.

Figure 2

Figure 2. Maximum value of $Nu_m$ and $Nu_h$ over $R_\Omega$ at fixed $Re$ in PCF and TCF as function of $Re$. The dotted black line shows the scaling $Nu\sim Re ^{0.6}$.

Figure 3

Figure 3. HTE as function of $R_\Omega$ in (a) PCF and (b) TCF. Each line/colour represents a different constant $Re$. Arrows show trends for increasing $Re$ listed in § 2, and dots signify DNS results. The black line in (a) shows the high-$Re$ limit.

Figure 4

Figure 4. (a) Maximum $\text {HTE}$ over $R_\Omega$ at fixed $Re$ in PCF and TCF as function of $Re$. (b) Log–log plot of $\text {HTE}$ versus $1-R_\Omega$ in PCF at $Re = 17\,200$ and $40\,000$ and TCF at $Re=19\,688$, $25\,531$ and $40\,000$. The black solid line shows the high-$Re$ limit $\text {HTE}=1/(1-R_\Omega )$. $Nu_h/Nu^r_h$ versus $Nu_m/Nu^r_m$ at fixed $Re$ for (c) PCF and (d) TCF. $Nu^r_{m,h}$ is the reference Nusselt number corresponding to the non-rotating case ($R_\Omega =0$) in PCF and the fixed outer cylinder case ($R_\Omega =1-\eta =0.29$) in TCF. $R_\Omega$ increases in the counterclockwise direction.

Figure 5

Figure 5. (a) Profiles of $\langle U\rangle$ and $\langle T\rangle$ in PCF at $Re=40\,000$ and $R_\Omega =0$ and 0.9. (b) Profiles of the root-mean-square of the streamwise and wall-normal velocity fluctuations $u'$ and $v'$, respectively, and temperature fluctuation $\theta '$ in PCF at $(Re;R_\Omega )=(40\,000;0.98)$. Mean and fluctuating velocity and temperature are scaled by $U_w$ and $T_w$, respectively, and $y$ is the distance to the wall ($y/d=0$ or 1 at the walls).

Figure 6

Figure 6. Snapshot of the instantaneous temperature fluctuation field at (a,b) $Re=400$ and $R_\Omega =0.9$ and (c,d) $Re=40\,000$ and $R_\Omega =0.99$ in (a,c) PCF and (b,d) TCF in a cross-stream plane. In (b) the full and in (a,c,d) a part of the spanwise/axial domain is shown.

Figure 7

Figure 7. (a) Time series of $K$ in PCF at $R_\Omega =0.97$ and TCF at $R_\Omega =0.98$ and $Re=40\,000$. Time is non-dimensionalized by the shear rate $S=\Delta U/d$. (b) Phase space plot of volume integrated $K$ and enstrophy $\omega ^2$, and wall shear stress $\tau _w$ in PCF at $Re=40\,000$ and $R_\Omega =0.99$. Yellow and blue colours indicate large and small temperature fluctuations, respectively. (c) Frequency of the bursts non-dimensionalized by $S$ for PCF and TCF. The black solid line gives the growth rate of the most unstable mode in PCF predicted by linear theory.

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