No abstract

The possibility ofmeasuring heat and moisture fluxes using sonic anemometer data is investigated. Theoretical relations for the temperature variance and heat flux are derived. In the first part of this paper, these relations are verified by experimental data, involving a sonic anemometer, a fast thermocouple and a Lyman-cc hygrometer. In the second part we propose two simple procedures to estimate heat flux from sonic anemometer data. The first one requires a rough estimate of the Bowen ratio; for the second one the net radiation is needed. Using the last method, a good estimate of the moisture flux is also obtained.

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) and experiments are carried out to study fully developed turbulent pipe flow at Reynolds number Rec ≈ 7000 based on centreline velocity and pipe diameter. The agreement between numerical and experimental results is excellent for the lower-order statistics (mean flow and turbulence intensities) and reasonably good for the higher-order statistics (skewness and flatness factors). To investigate the differences between fully developed turbulent flow in an axisymmetric pipe and a plane channel geometry, the present DNS results are compared to those obtained from a channel flow simulation. Beside the mean flow properties and turbulence statistics up to fourth order, the energy budgets of the Reynolds-stress components are computed and compared. The present results show that the mean velocity profile in the pipe fails to conform to the accepted law of the wall, in contrast to the channel flow. This confirms earlier observations reported in the literature. The statistics on fluctuating velocities, including the energy budgets of the Reynolds stresses, appear to be less affected by the axisymmetric pipe geometry. Only the skewness factor of the normal-to-the-wall velocity fluctuations differs in the pipe flow compared to the channel flow. The energy budgets illustrate that the normal-to-the-wall velocity fluctuations in the pipe are altered owing to a different ‘impingement’ or ‘splatting’ mechanism close to the curved wall.

Transition to turbulence in pipe flow is one of the most fundamental and longest-standing problems in fluid dynamics. Stability theory suggests that the flow remains laminar for all flow rates, but in practice pipe flow becomes turbulent even at moderate speeds. This transition drastically affects the transport efficiency of mass, momentum, and heat. On the basis of the recent discovery of unstable traveling waves in computational studies of the Navier-Stokes equations and ideas from dynamical systems theory, a model for the transition process has been suggested. We report experimental observation of these traveling waves in pipe flow, confirming the proposed transition scenario and suggesting that the dynamics associated with these unstable states may indeed capture the nature of fluid turbulence.