Investigations on mixing phenomena in single-phase flow in a T-junction geometry Original Research Article

The paper deals with T-junction mixing experiments carried out with wire-mesh sensors. The mixing of coolant streams of different temperature in pipe junctions leads to temperature fluctuations that may cause thermal fatigue in the pipe wall. This is practical background for an increased interest in measuring and predicting the transient flow field and the turbulent mixing pattern downstream of a T-junction. Experiments were carried out at a perpendicular connection of two pipes of 51 mm inner diameter. The straight and the side branches were supplied by water of different electrical conductivity, which replaced the temperature in the thermal mixing process. A set of three wire-mesh sensors with a grid of 16 × 16 measuring points each was used to record conductivity distributions downstream of the T-junction. Besides the measurement of profiles of the time averaged mixing scalar over extended measuring domains, the high resolution in time and space of the mesh sensors allow a statistic characterization of the stochastic fluctuations of the mixing scalar in a wide range of frequencies. Information on the scale of turbulent mixing patterns is obtained by cross-correlating the signal fluctuations recorded at different locations within the measuring plane of a sensor.