RADIATION STATISTICS IN HOMOGENEOUS

ISOTROPIC TURBULENCE
C.B. da Silva*, I. Malico**, P.J. Coelho* and J.C.F. Pereira*
*Mechanical Engineering Department, IDMEC/IST
Technical University of Lisboa, Av. Rovisco Pais, 1049-001 Lisboa, Portugal
**Physics Department
University of Évora, R. Romão Ramalho, 59, 7000-671 Évora, Portugal

INTRODUCTION
• The interaction between turbulence and radiation (TRI) is a relevant issue in turbulent reactive flows, yielding an increase of the radiative heat fluxes in comparison with laminar flows.
• Direct numerical simulation (DNS) provides fundamental and reliable insight on turbulent flows, but it can only be applied to simple geometries and low Reynolds number flows.
• In the present work, DNS is used to investigate TRI in a homogeneous isotropic turbulent non-reactive flow using a pseudo-spectral code for the DNS, and a ray tracing method along
with the correlated k-distribution method for radiative transfer calculations.

THEORETICAL ANALYSIS RESULTS

DNS Calculations • The radiative transfer calculations were carried out assuming that the mean temperature of the
medium is 1500 K, and that the medium is a mixture of CO2 and N2, the mean mole fraction of CO2
• The DNS calculations for the transport of a passive scalar in a statistically
being 0.10. The rms of temperature and CO2 mole fraction were taken as 150 K and 0.01, respectively.
steady (forced) homogeneous isotropic turbulent flow were carried out
using a standard pseudo-spectral code in which the temporal • The optical thickness of the medium is equal to one. It was further assumed that the temperature
advancement is made with an explicit 3rd order Runge-Kutta scheme. and the absorbing species fields are fully correlated.
3.6 0.016
• The physical domain is a periodic cubic box of side 2π discretized using a Flatness
3 3.4
uniform mesh with 192 grid nodes. 0.014

3.2
0.012 Figure 3 - Joint pdf of the radiation
• The analysis was performed using up to 40 instantaneous fields after all
κ (m-1)
3.0 intensity and the Planck mean
Statistics of radiation intensity

0.010 absorption coefficient.

the turbulence quantities are statistically stationary.
0.008

Radiative Transfer Calculations 1.0

0.006
I I b (T )
• The radiative transfer calculations are performed using also a cubic box. 1/2 50000 100000 150000
 I′ 2
I I (W/m2 sr)
The length of the side, L, is taken as the ratio of the optical thickness of the  
Skewness
medium, which is prescribed, to the Planck mean absorption coefficient. 0.5

3.3 3.5 3.5

3.4
3.2 3.3
3.0 3.2
• Data from the flow domain are rescaled into the radiation domain assuming 3.1 3.1
3.0
3.0 2.5
kinematical similarity, wich for scalar variable φ yields: 0 1.05 1.05 1.10
Statistics of radiation intensity

10 20 30 40
1.00 1.00 1.05
Number of fields
& & & c2 !
 Irad 1.00
Irad  x   Irad  x  ! IDNS  x 
0.95 0.95
1/2
Figure 1 - Normalized values of the mean, 0.5 I I b (T )  I ′2  I 0.5
2
c
 IDNS ! rms, skewness and flatness of the Skewness
 
Flatness
0.4
0.5

0.4 0.4
radiation intensity leaving the 0.3
0.3 0.3
computational domain as a function 0.2
• The radiative properties of the medium are evaluated using the correlated k- of the number of instantaneous fields. 0.2
0.1
0.2

distribution (CK) method. The integration of the RTE along a line of sight 0.1
0.0 0.1

0.0 -0.1 0.0

yields 0.1 1 10 100 0 50 100 150 200 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800
Optical thickness rms (T) [K] Temperature [K]

I i ,'Q k s 
ª
I i ,'Q k 0  exp « ³
s
 ki s*
º
ds » 
*
³ 0 ki   I b,'Q  
s
s* k
s*
ª
exp «
s
³ s* ki  
s ** ds **
º *
» ds
Figure 4 - Influence of the optical thickness, mean and rms temperature on the
radiations statistics.
¬ 0 ¼ ¬ ¼

• The radiation intensity entering the calculation domain at s = 0 is not k P′ I b′ / k P′2 I b′2
1.02 kG′ I ′ / kG′2 I ′2 1.05 1.10
10-1
prescribed, but determined to enforce that the entering intensity is equal 1.00
k P′ I ′ / k ′P
2
I′ 2

to the leaving intensity, i.e., I i ,∆ν L = I i ,∆ν 0

k
( ) k
( ) 10-2
I
κ
0.98
1.00
1.05

1.00
0.96
0.95
0.95
• The statistical data reported below was obtained from the DNS data using
pdf (I), pdf (κ)

10-3 0.94
Correlations

0.92 0.90
all the available optical paths parallel to the coordinate axes kP Ib / kP Ib kG I / kG I
0.90
10-4 0.0
kP I / kP I 0.8 -0.20

-0.2 0.4 -0.40

10-5
-0.4 0.0 -0.60

-0.6 -0.4 -0.80

-6
10
-2 0 2 4 6 -0.8 -1.00
-0.8
I I , κ κ
(I ) (κ )
1/2 -1.0 -1.2 -1.20
2 2 1/2
0 1 10 100 0 50 100 150 200 600 800 1000 1200 1400 1600 1800
kL rms (T) [K] Temperature [K]
Figure 2 - Probability density functions of
the radiation intensity and Planck mean Figure 5 - Influence of the optical thickness, mean and rms temperature on
absorption coefficient. several correlations

CONCLUSIONS
2
6 u N u Nt 2
6 u 192 u N t | 2.2 u 10 u N t5 • Nt = 1 is not enough to obtain statistically independent results, but the influence of Nt on the results
becomes marginal when Nt exceeds 20 to 25.

• The influence of the optical thickness on the radiations statistics is marginal for homogeneous and
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS isotropic turbulence. The correlation k P′ I ′ is small, but its influence tends to increase with the optical
thickness of the medium.
This work was developed within the framework of project POCI/
EME/59879/2004, which is financially supported by FCT-Fundação para a • The normalized mean radiation intensity leaving the physical domain increases with rms(T), but
Ciência e a Tecnologia, programme POCI 2010 (29.82% of the funds from decreases with the mean temperature. The correlations k ′ I ′ and k P′ I ′ increase, in absolute value,
P b
FEDER and 70.18% from OE). with the increase of either T or rms(T).