Experimental Investigation of Nozzle Orientation Effects on Mixing Characteristics of Elliptic Triple Free Jets

An experimental investigation of nozzle orientation effects on turbulent characteristics of elliptic triple free jets was carried out for three nozzle configurations. The first configuration had all three nozzles oriented along the minor plane (3_Minor), the next had two nozzles oriented along the minor plane and one along the major plane (2_Minor_1_Major) and the last configuration had one nozzle oriented along the minor plane and two along the major plane (1_Minor_2_Major). The experiments were conducted using modified contoured nozzles with a sharp linear contraction for a nozzle-to-nozzle distance of 4.1, a nozzle equivalent diameter of 9 mm and a Reynolds number of 10,000. The effects of nozzle orientation on the mean velocity, turbulence intensity and Reynolds shear stress were discussed. The velocity decay, jet spread, merging point, combined point and potential core length were used to characterize the effects of nozzle orientation on the mixing performance. The results show that the 3_Minor configuration had shorter potential core length and closer merging point location which are indicative of a faster mixing in the converging region. Two-point correlation, skewness and flatness factors were used to provide insight into the effects of nozzle orientation on turbulence structure and higher order turbulence statistics.