Committee Chair

Ranjan, Reetesh

Committee Member

Sreenivas, Kidambi; Margraves, Charles

Department

Dept. of Mechanical Engineering

College

College of Engineering and Computer Science

Publisher

University of Tennessee at Chattanooga

Place of Publication

Chattanooga (Tenn.)

Abstract

Stably stratified turbulent flows are observed in many systems, ranging from engineering applications to environmental flows. The density variation in such flows, particularly that observed in water bodies depends on temperature and salinity (salt content) through an equation of state (EoS). The molecular diffusion of the temperature and salinity in such flows differ substantially, which leads to the presence of a differential diffusion phenomenon. This furthers the complexity of stratified turbulence, where the density stratification is known to alter the dynamics of turbulence. In this study, results from direct numerical simulations of stably stratified turbulent channel flow under moderate levels of differential diffusion and two types of EoS are examined in terms of instantaneous, statistical, spectral, and modal features of the flow field. The study shows that the effects of differential diffusion are dominant compared to the type of EoS on the spatio-temporal dynamics and statistics of the flow field.

Acknowledgments

I would like to acknowledge Dr. Reetesh Ranjan for his guidance and support during this work. I would also like to thank my thesis committee members, Dr. Kidambi Sreenivas and Dr. Charles Margraves, for their support during my graduate program at UTC. I would like to thank the members of the Fluid and Combustion Modeling group for their support during this research work. I would like to acknowledge the Center of Excellence in Applied Computational Science and Engineering grant from UTC for funding part of this research work. I acknowledge the support of the staff at the UTC Research Institute for their assistance and access to the computational resources.

Degree

M. S.; A thesis submitted to the faculty of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga in partial fulfillment of the requirements of the degree of Master of Science.

Date

8-2024

Subject

Stratified flow; Equations of state

Keyword

Stratification; Equation of state; Differential diffusion; Direct numerical simulation

Document Type

Masters theses

DCMI Type

Text

Extent

xii, 93 leaves

Language

English

Rights

http://rightsstatements.org/vocab/InC/1.0/

License

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/4.0/

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