The Measurement of Diffusivity and Turbulence in Fully Developed Pipe Flow

Abstract

An experimental study of turbulent air flow in a pipe is reported in this paper. A determination was made of the mean velocity distribution and longitudinal mean turbulent velocity distribution, both in the turbulent core and boundary layer for four different Reynolds numbers from 7300 to 58300. A traversing mechanism was designed in order to measure the turbulence correlations between two points. The variation of the macro scale length, one of the fundamental quantities in recent statistical turbulence theory across the pipe diameter was calculated for Reynolds number equal to 58300, by integrating the correlation curves. The turbulent momentum diffusivity at the center of a pipe was calculated from the correlation study and the dimension less value was found to be 0.111. Ethylene gas was injected into the center of the pipe, and in order to investigate the turbulent mass diffusivity, the concentration distribution curves of ethylene were measured at different test positions downstream from the injection point, for the same series of Reynolds numbers used in the turbulence measurement. A numerical method for calculating the diffusivity was developed. The values of diffusivity obtained. in these experiments show that the assumptions which were used by most of the authors, that of (turbulent mass diffusivity/turbulent momentum diffusivity) has a value between 1.0 to 1.6 is correct.