TURBULENT FLOW CHARACTERISTICS OF DUAL JET INTERACTIONS USING DIFFERENT TURBULENCE MODELS

This paper, reports the numerical results of the turbulent flow characteristics and turbulent quantities when a triangular object is placed at the exit of two nozzles. The fluid flow at the entrance of the nozzles is considered isothermal and incompressible. Three turbulence k-ε models are used to study the jets interaction and its resulting characteristics. The numerical method is first validated with the available experimental results for a configuration where no object is placed between nozzles. Numerical simulations are carried out for fixed turbulence intensity at the nozzles exit (3%), and for Reynolds numbers varied from 2.103 to 104. Results reveal that the existence of a solid object between the dual jets affects the location of the merge and combined points. The merge point is pushed downstream of the flow, and the corresponding axial velocity of the combined point is reduced for all Reynolds numbers. The turbulent kinetic energy field is also affected, either in the near field or in the far field for all Reynolds numbers. We have concluded also that the Realizable k-ε model overestimates velocity and turbulent kinetic energy fields compared to the other models.