Experimental Investigation on Mean Flow Development of a Three-Dimensional Wall Jet Confined by a Vertical Baffle

Three-dimensional (3D) confined wall jets have various engineering applications related to efficient energy dissipation. This paper presents experimental measurements of mean flow development for a 3D rectangular wall jet confined by a vertical baffle with a fixed distance (400 mm) from its surface to the nozzle. Experiments were performed at three different Reynolds numbers of 8333, 10,000 and 11,666 based on jet exit velocity and square root of jet exit area (named as B), with water depth of 100 mm. Detailed measurements of current jet were taken using a particle image velocimetry technique. The results indicate that the confined jet seems to behave like an undisturbed jet until 16B downstream. Beyond this position, however, the mean flow development starts to be gradually affected by the baffle confinement. The baffle increases the decay and spreading of the mean flow from 16B to 23B. The decay rate of 1.11 as well as vertical and lateral growth rates of 0.04 and 0.19, respectively, were obtained for the present study, and also fell well within the range of values which correspond to the results in the radial decay region for the unconfined case. In addition, the measurements of the velocity profiles, spreading rates and velocity decay were also found to be independent of Reynolds number. Therefore, the flow field in this region appears to have fully developed at least 4B earlier than the unconfined case. Further downstream (after 23B), the confinement becomes more pronounced. The vertical spreading of current jet shows a distinct increase, while the lateral growth was found to be decreased significantly. It can be also observed that the maximum mean velocity decreases sharply close to the baffle.