Turbulent Characteristics in a Taylor-Couette Flow

Abstract

For future work on the turbulent premixed flame propagation in high intensity turbulent flow, we measured the turbulence characteristics in the Taylor-Couette flow apparatus between two counter rotating concentric cylinders. The turbulence characteristics such as the integral, the Taylor's micro, and the Kolmogorov scales, intensities and power spectral density functions are obtained from the velocity fluctuations of the radial and circumferential components in the annulus measured by hotwire anemometry.
The intensity of the velocity fluctuation of the circumferential component linearly increased as Reynolds number Re_Ω increased. At the highest Reynolds number (Re_Ω = 7,200) in the present work, the intensity is more than two times as large as the lean laminar flame velocity for a methane-air mixture (0.12m/s), which corresponds to the regime of corrugated flamelets. Our results suggest that the Taylor-Couette flow apparatus is useful to study the premixed-flame propagation in high intensity turbulent flow.