Stratified flows are closely associated with many actual problems, such as inversion in the atmosphere, dispersion of thermal effluents into natural water bodies, thermal stratification in lakes and reservoirs, heat storage tanks with thermally stratified flows and cooling of large air spaces. Therefore, the problems of stratified flows are an important subject of study in the fields of meteorology, limnology, and engineering. Many studies have been made on stratified flows in the above fields. Most of these studies, however, deal with the structure of turbulence in the stratified layers or mixing between the top and the bottom layer through the stratified shear layer, and there are few experimental studies dealing with mixing between the top and the bottom layer under circulation in the top layer or the bottom layer. The purpose of this experimental study is to clarify the hydrodynamic behavior of the thermally stratified layer under belt-driven circulation in the top layer of rectangular water tanks. The experimental conditions are; velocity of the water surface: 5〜20cm/s, initial depth of the thermally stratified layer: 10〜20cm, temperature difference between the top and bottom layers: 3〜12℃, and depth, length and width of the water tanks: 20〜40cm, 19.2〜80.0cm and 25〜40cm, respectively. The results of visualization of the flows in the water tanks show that mixing between the top and bottom layers occurs mainly in the sinking area of the top layer's circulation and that the other part of the stratified layer is very stable. It is also clear that the bottom layer is almost at rest. The temperature in the rectangular water tanks is uniform in the horizontal direction, but changes in the depth direction. The depth of the thermally stratified layer, which is defined as the depth where the temperature gradient is maximum, gradually descends with time due to the entrainment of the bottom layer's water into the top layer; the descent velocity of the stratified layer is constant and is determined by the densimetric Froude numbre of which the characteristic velocity, length ahd density difference are defined as the velocity of the water surface, the depth of the stratified layer and the density difference between the top and the bottom layer, respectively.
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