Turbulent velocity profiles in a tilted heat pipe

Julien Salort (1) , Xavier Riedinger (1) , Eleonore Rusaouen (1) , Jean-Christophe Tisserand (1) , Fanny Seychelles (1) , Bernard Castaing (1) , Francesca Chillà (1)

1 Phys-ENS - Laboratoire de Physique de l'ENS Lyon

In this paper, we analyze the mean velocity profile and the Reynolds shear stress in a turbulent, inclined, heat pipe. We show that the simplest version of a mixing length model is unable to reproduce the evolution of the velocity profile shape with the inclination angle psi. An improvement of this model, taking into account some buoyancy effects, gives nice qualitative agreement with the observations. The agreement implies surprisingly a low value for the gradient Richardson number Ric above which the flow is laminar. The comparison with previous works shows however good agreement when some care is taken in the evaluation of the Richardson number Ri.

Domaines: Mécanique des fluides [physics.class-ph]

Julien Salort, Xavier Riedinger, Eleonore Rusaouen, Jean-Christophe Tisserand, Fanny Seychelles, et al.. Turbulent velocity profiles in a tilted heat pipe. Physics of Fluids, 2013, 25, pp.105110. ⟨10.1063/1.4824852⟩. ⟨hal-00861783⟩