A study on the measurement of mean velocity and its convergence in molecular dynamics simulations

In many particle‐based simulations, measurement of local mean flow velocity and other continuum‐based properties are of utmost importance. Macroscopic quantities, such as mean flow velocity, temperature, and density, can be estimated by averaging the corresponding microscopic behavior of the particles. The two main subjects that should be considered in the averaging over the particles in a specific problem are spatial and temporal behaviors of them. In this paper, we study the latter. Because of the chaotic nature of the collisions among the molecules and consequently their random path, extracted macroscopic values fluctuate about their average values causing statistical errors. In this paper, an averaging method called SAM‐Modified‐CAM (SMC) will be proposed for the measurement of mean velocity that reduces statistical errors in its calculation. This proposal is based on the study conducted here on the implementations of two common averaging methods, sample‐averaged measurement (SAM) and cumulative average measurement (CAM) in molecular dynamics. In addition, convergence of mean flow velocity measurement is thoroughly discussed, and a convergence criterion is proposed for this purpose. Implementation of the proposed method in different test cases has approved its reliable performance. Copyright © 2010 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

The influence of phase-averaging window size on the determination of turbulence quantities in unsteady turbulent flows

 The phase-averaging window size is shown to affect the measurement of phase-averaged turbulence quantities in unsteady turbulent flows. The flow turbulence is usually estimated on the assumption of quasi-constant flow velocity during the duration of the phase-averaging window. The calculated turbulence level then consists of two parts: one due to the turbulent velocity fluctuations and the other due to the changes in the mean flow velocity. This second part is shown to be directly proportional to the averaging window size. In order to determine the true turbulence the averaging window size has to be made as small as possible, especially if the unsteady flow exhibits large temporal gradients and the flow turbulence itself is small. Received: 9 April 1996/Acceped: 17 August 1996     

Direct numerical simulation of turbulence over resolved and modeled rough walls with irregularly distributed roughness

To simulate turbulent flow over a rough wall without resolving complicated rough geometries, a macroscopic rough wall model is developed based on spatial (plane) averaging theory. The plane-averaged drag force term, which arises through averaging the Navier–Stokes equations in a plane parallel to a rough wall, can be modeled using a plane porosity and a plane hydraulic diameter. To evaluate the developed model, direct and macroscopic model simulations for turbulence over irregularly distributed semi-spheres at Reynolds number of 300 are carried out using the D3Q27 multiple-relaxation time lattice Boltzmann method. The results show that the developed model can be used to predict rough wall skin friction. The results agree quantitatively with standard turbulence statistics such as mean velocity and Reynolds stress profiles with the fully resolved DNS data. Since velocity dispersion occurs inside the rough wall and is found to contribute to turbulence energy dissipation, which the developed model cannot account for, the developed model fails to reproduce dispersion-related turbulence energy dissipation. However, it is found that the plane-averaged drag force term can successfully recover the deficiency of dispersion-related turbulence energy dissipation.     

Improvement of measurement accuracy in micro PIV by image overlapping

Micro PIV uses volume illumination; therefore, the velocity measured at the focal plane is a weighted average of the velocities within the measurement volume. The contribution of out-of-focus particles to the PIV correlation can generate significant measurement errors particularly in near wall regions. We present a new application of image overlapping, which is shown to be very effective in improving the accuracy of time-averaged velocity measurements by effectively reducing the measurement depth. The performance of image overlapping and correlation averaging were studied using synthetic and experimental images of micro channel flow, both with and without image pre-processing. The results show that for flows without particle clumping, image overlapping provides the best measurement accuracy without any need for image pre-processing. For flows with particle clumping, image overlapping combined with band-pass filtering provides the best measurement accuracy. When overlapped images are saturated with particles due to a large number of image pairs, image overlapping measurement still does not show any visible pixel-locking effect. Image overlapping was found to have comparable or slightly reduced pixel-locking effects compared to correlation averaging. In addition, image overlapping utilizes significantly fewer computational resources than the other techniques.     

Effect of measurement volume size on turbulent flow measurement using ultrasonic Doppler method

This paper presents the results of an investigation on the effects of measurement volume size on the mean velocity profile and the Reynolds stress for fully developed turbulent pipe flows. The study employs the ultrasonic velocity profile method, which is based on the ultrasonic Doppler method. The ultrasonic Doppler method offers many advantages over conventional methods for flow rate measurement in the nuclear power plant piping system. This method is capable of measuring the instantaneous velocity profile along the measuring line and is applicable for opaque liquids and opaque pipe wall materials. Furthermore, the method has the characteristic of being non-intrusive. Although it is applicable to various flow conditions, it requires a relatively large measurement volume. The measurement volume of the present method has a disk-shape determined by the effective diameter of the piezoelectric element and the number of the wave cycles of the ultrasonic pulse. Considering this disk-shaped measurement volume and expressing the time-averaged velocity in a truncated Taylor series expansion around the value at the center of the measuring control volume, the value of the velocity can be obtained. The results are then compared with the data obtained from DNS and LDA measurements. The result shows that the effect of the measurement volume size appears in the buffer region and viscous sublayer.     

Visualisation of air–water bubbly column flow using array Ultrasonic Velocity Profiler

In the present work, an experimental study of bubbly two-phase flow in a rectangular bubble column was performed using two ultrasonic array sensors, which can measure the instantaneous velocity of gas bubbles on multiple measurement lines. After the sound pressure distribution of sensors had been evaluated with a needle hydrophone technique, the array sensors were applied to two-phase bubble column. To assess the accuracy of the measurement system with array sensors for one and two-dimensional velocity, a simultaneous measurement was performed with an optical measurement technique called particle image velocimetry(PIV). Experimental results showed that accuracy of the measurement system with array sensors is under 10% for one-dimensional velocity profile measurement compared with PIV technique. The accuracy of the system was estimated to be under 20% along the mean flow direction in the case of two-dimensional vector mapping.     

An experimental study of a turbulent vortex ring: a three-dimensional representation

This paper presents a reconstruction of the three-dimensional velocity field of a turbulent vortex ring by means of Taylor’s hypothesis. Stereoscopic PIV is used to acquire three velocity component information on a plane. The accuracy of the Taylor’s hypothesis for this particular flow pattern is first discussed, and the three-dimensional velocity and vorticity information are then presented. This study also introduces an azimuthally averaging method in order to give a mean structure in cylindrical coordinates from a single realization and from which turbulent stresses and production can be estimated. The azimuthally averaged quantities are then compared with the ensemble-averaged results from the previous planar (two-dimensional and stereoscopic) PIV experiments.     

Effect of velocity and pipeline configuration on dispersion in turbulent hydrocarbon-water flow using laser image processing

Drop size distribution and concentration profile data for hydrocarbon-water mixtures are obtained in a 8.2 cm dia pipe at a range of velocities for a straight horizontal pipe, horizontal and vertical flow after one bend and vertical flow after three bends. The laser image processing technique employed in this project is proven reliable.

The maximum drop size (d₉₉), is more dependent on the number of upstream interactive bends than on the velocity. The drop size distributions follow a Rosin-Rammler power law. The values of Rosin-Rammler exponents, based on this work, are on average 2.1 for all the configurations studied.

The concentration profiles as a function of velocity for straight horizontal flow are obtained and show the transition from stratified to adequately dispersed flow at about 2.3 m/s velocity. The concentration profiles for horizontal or vertical flow after one bend show dispersed flow in some cases; however, in other cases swirling makes representative sampling more difficult.

Vertical downflow after three interactive bends breaks the droplets to a finer size, and concentration profiles obtained in this location are more uniform than the other configurations studied. Representative sampling can be accomplished in this location even at 0.7–1.0 m/s velocity, in a 8.2 cm pipe.     

Coupled Navier–Stokes/molecular dynamics simulations in nonperiodic domains based on particle forcing

This paper focuses on coupling methods for hybrid Navier–Stokes/molecular dynamics (MD) simulations. The computational domain is split in a continuum flow region, where a finite‐volume discretisation of the Navier–Stokes equations is used, and one or more particle domains, where molecular level modelling of the flow is employed. The domains are defined with a partial overlap, in which the flow states are coupled through an exchange of the velocity components. For the steady flows considered, an under‐relaxed Newton iteration method is used to drive the coupled system to convergence. The main focus of the present work is on methods to impose nonperiodic boundary conditions on the particle domain(s). A particle forcing is applied in the direction normal to the particle domain boundary to impose the boundary normal velocity component. A novel aspect of the present work is the extension of this method to more general nonplanar particle domain boundaries. The main contribution of the paper is the development of a particle forcing method in the direction tangential to the domain boundary, which is based on the equivalent continuum‐flow boundary shear stresses along with an iterative forcing strength adjustment based on the extrapolated particle boundary velocity. Furthermore, an adaptation scheme is presented, which uses the finite‐volume flux residuals of the particle bin averaged velocity field as a truncation criterion for the iterative force‐update scheme. It is demonstrated that by comparing the residual reduction for the momentum equation in the nonhomogeneous directions during the molecular dynamics simulations with that for a homogeneous direction, the forcing iteration at which the statistical noise in the velocity field dominates the uncertainty in the forcing strength can be determined. At this point the iteration can be truncated. It is shown that with adaptive schemes of this type, the total number of MD evaluations required in a coupled Navier–Stokes/MD simulation can be reduced relative to a hybrid scheme with a fixed number of forcing‐strength updates. Copyright © 2011 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.     

Velocity measurements in slow flow by the conductance-tracer method

The conductance tracer velocity measurement method, which is usually employed for determination of mean velocity, is extended to point velocity measurement of the order of a few millimeters per second with accuracies of the order of 10%. Velocity is determined by the time required for a conducting solution to travel between two measuring stations. At each station the conductance between two electrodes is sampled and the resulting conductance time trace is analysed numerically. Cross talk and electrolysis problems are overcome by AC current, alternate switching conductance measurements. The leading edge criteria, suggested in this work, seem to be best suited for travel time determination in such flows. The existence of shear does not seem to have an influence on the validity or the accuracy of the measurement.     

An LDA technique for in situ simultaneous velocity and size measurement of large spherical particles in a two-phase suspension flow

A relatively simple optical scheme using the reference-mode laser Doppler anemometry for the in situ measurement of flow properties of a dilute particle-fluid two-phase suspension having a predominant flow direction is hereby proposed. It is an extension of the established technique of optical gating for particle sizing which is fully integrated into the established technique of laser Doppler anemometry for velocity measurement. Particles that can be measured by this scheme are limited to those with sizes greater than the smaller dimension of the optical measuring volume. Inherent in the methodology is a procedure for providing information on the local particle number density and velocity distributions for each size range of the particles and the local velocity distribution of the continuous phase. The accompanying electronics and interfaces are also established for data processing and analysis in a mini computer. Validation of the scheme has been accomplished by controlled experiments using stainless steel balls and water droplets of 1 mm and greater in diameter.     

Generalized displacement estimation for averages of non-stationary flows

When dealing with particle image velocimetry data sets with a relatively poor signal-to-noise ratio, averaged velocity fields are often the only achievable result. These average fields can be determined in a number of ways, of which correlation averaging has become the most prominent. We show that for instationary flows, the use of correlation averaging can lead to unreliable results: summation of individual correlation peaks from a transient flow creates a broadened peak. The location of the maximum of this peak generally does not coincide with the true temporal mean displacement. We propose to use the centroid of the correlation result as a better estimator. This method is demonstrated with simulated and experimental data, showing that it gives more reliable results, at the price of a small increase in noise level. For relatively small displacements, where the conventional method is not biased, the method is less suitable due to this increase in noise. Therefore, a straightforward hybrid method optimizes the displacement estimation for optimal results.     

NUMERICAL ANALYZITION OF NANO-PARTICLE FOLLOWING FEATURES FOR RAYLEIGH SCATTERING VELOCITY MEASUREMENT TEST IN LOW DENSITY WIND TUNNEL

在低密度风洞试验流场中,加入少量纳米粒子,可以增强瑞利散射测速试验的散射光强度.纳米粒子能否适应流场气流速度变化是测量结果准确性的关键.为了研究瑞利散射测速实验中测量到的纳米粒子的速度能否反映流场当地气流速度,采用基于直接模拟蒙特卡罗方法的稀薄两相流双向耦合算法,对低密度风洞流场中纳米粒子在大梯度流场中的跟随性进行了数值研究.仿真了10 nm,50 nm和100 nm TiO₂三种尺寸的纳米粒子分别在M6和M12低密度风洞返回舱高超声速绕流流场中的运动特性.仿真结果显示,不同尺寸的纳米粒子在不同的流场稀薄度条件下的跟随性不同,纳米粒子尺寸越小,跟随性越好.在稀薄度较低的M6流场中,10 nm粒子跟随性很好,与瑞利散射测量结果比较接近,粒径50 nm以上的粒子跟随性较差,而在稀薄度较高的M12流场中,10 nm粒子的跟随性也变差,表明通过瑞利散射测量到的纳米粒子速度和流场中气体速度有一定差距,不能准确反映流场当地速度.     

An insitu borescopic quantitative imaging profiler for the measurement of high concentration sediment velocity

The design, calibration, and testing of a borescopic quantitative imaging profiler (BQuIP) system, suitable for the insitu measurement of two components of the instantaneous velocity in high sediment concentration flows, are presented. Unlike planar quantitative imaging techniques, BQuIP has a concentration-dependent field of view, requiring detailed calibration. BQuIP is demonstrated in unidirectional sheet flow in an open channel flume with a narrow-graded sand with median diameter 0.25 mm. Acoustic velocity measurements are made in the suspension region above the BQuIP measured region yielding a continuous measurement of velocity and turbulent stress from the immobile bed to just below the free surface. The temporal history at a point reveals the sheet flow sediment velocities to be highly intermittent, and the spectra reveal a broad range of temporal scales close to −5/3 in slope for the streamwise velocity component. At its core BQuIP is a quantitative imaging technique giving it significant flexibility in terms of both the spatial and temporal analysis parameters (e.g., interrogation subwindow size and Δt, the time between images in a pair to be analyzed), allowing it to have tremendous dynamic range in terms of the velocities that can be measured.     

A crossed hot-wire technique for complex turbulent flows

This paper describes a crossed hot-wire technique for the measurement of all components of mean velocity, Reynolds stresses, and triple products in a complex turbulent flow. The accuracy of various assumptions usually implicit in the use of crossed hot-wire anemometers is examined. It is shown that significant errors can result in flow with gradients in mean velocity or Reynolds stress, but that a first order correction for these errors can be made using available data. It is also shown how corrections can be made for high turbulence levels using available data.     

The effect of spatial wandering on experimental laser velocimeter measurements of the end-wall vortices in an axial-flow pump

In a high Reynolds number axial-flow pump, laser velocimeter (LV) measurements were made to study the size and structure of the end-wall vortex. The time mean measurements show that the core size of the end-wall vortex increased with decreasing tip clearance, which is contrary to existing theory. Observations of cavitation in the vortex showed that the flow was unsteady. The vortices emanating from the smaller clearances were observed to wander or meander spatially and to develop kinks more than the vortices emanating from the larger tip clearances. This observed unsteadiness has a significant effect on the time mean size and velocity distribution of the vortex as measured with the LV employing the field point measurement technique. In order to obtain an estimate of the true size and velocity distribution, computational experiments were conducted which modelled a periodically wandering vortex and the LV measurement process. The computational and experimental results show good agreement, including a broadened and reduced tangential velocity distribution. In this paper, the end-wall vortex LV measurements are presented, and the method of analyzing the vortex wandering is described.     

Spatial resolution and dissipation rate estimation in Taylor--Couette flow for tomographic PIV

This paper assesses the spatial resolution and accuracy of tomographic particle image velocimetry (PIV). In tomographic PIV the number of velocity vectors are of the order of the number of reconstructed particle images, and sometimes even exceeds this number when a high overlap fraction between adjacent interrogations is used. This raises the question of the actual spatial resolution of tomographic PIV in relation to the various flow scales. We use a Taylor--Couette flow of a fluid between two independently rotating cylinders and consider three flow regimes: laminar flow, Taylor vortex flow and fully turbulent flow. The laminar flow has no flow structures, and the measurement results are used to assess the measurement uncertainty and to validate the accuracy of the technique for measurements through the curved wall. In the Taylor vortex flow regime, the flow contains large-scale flow structures that are much larger than the size of the interrogation volumes and are fully resolved. The turbulent flow regime contains a range of flow scales. Measurements in the turbulent flow regime are carried out for a Reynolds number Re between 3,800 and 47,000. We use the measured torque on the cylinders to obtain an independent estimate of the energy dissipation rate and estimate of the Kolmogorov length scale. The data obtained by tomographic PIV are assessed by estimating the dissipation rate and comparing the result against the dissipation rate obtained from the measured torque. The turbulent flow data are evaluated for different sizes of the interrogation volumes and for different overlap ratios between adjacent interrogation locations. The results indicate that the turbulent flow measurements for the lowest Re could be (nearly) fully resolved. At the highest Re only a small fraction of the dissipation rate is resolved, still a reasonable estimate of the total dissipation rate could be obtained by means of using a sub-grid turbulence model. The resolution of tomographic PIV in these measurements is determined by the size of the interrogation volume. We propose a range of vector spacing for fully resolving the turbulent flow scales. It is noted that the use of a high overlap ratio, that is, 75?%, yields a substantial improvement for the estimation of the dissipation rate in comparison with data for 0 and 50?% overlap. This indicates that additional information on small-scale velocity gradients can be obtained by reducing the data spacing.     

Measurement of laminar,transitional and turbulent pipe flow using Stereoscopic-PIV

Stereoscopic particle image velocimetry (SPIV) is applied to measure the instantaneous three component velocity field of pipe flow over the full circular cross-section of the pipe. The light sheet is oriented perpendicular to the main flow direction, and therefore the flow structures are advected through the measurement plane by the mean flow. Applying Taylor’s hypothesis, the 3D flow field is reconstructed from the sequence of recorded vector fields. The large out-of-plane motion in this configuration puts a strong constraint on the recorded particle displacements, which limits the measurement accuracy. The light sheet thickness becomes an important parameter that determines the balance between the spatial resolution and signal to noise ratio. It is further demonstrated that so-called registration errors, which result from a small misalignment between the laser light sheet and the calibration target, easily become the predominant error in SPIV measurements. Measurements in laminar and turbulent pipe flow are compared to well established direct numerical simulations, and the accuracy of the instantaneous velocity vectors is found to be better than 1% of the mean axial velocity. This is sufficient to resolve the secondary flow patterns in transitional pipe flow, which are an order of magnitude smaller than the mean flow.     

Dynamic measurement of temperature, velocity, and density in hot jets using Rayleigh scattering

A molecular Rayleigh scattering technique is utilized to measure gas temperature, velocity, and density in unseeded gas flows at sampling rates up to 10 kHz, providing fluctuation information up to 5 kHz based on the Nyquist theorem. A high-power continuous-wave laser beam is focused at a point in an air flow field and Rayleigh scattered light is collected and fiber-optically transmitted to a Fabry–Perot interferometer for spectral analysis. Photomultiplier tubes operated in the photon counting mode allow high-frequency sampling of the total signal level and the circular interference pattern to provide dynamic density, temperature, and velocity measurements. Mean and root mean square velocity, temperature, and density, as well as power spectral density calculations, are presented for measurements in a hydrogen-combustor heated jet facility with a 50.8-mm diameter nozzle at NASA John H. Glenn Research Center at Lewis Field. The Rayleigh measurements are compared with particle image velocimetry data and computational fluid dynamics predictions. This technique is aimed at aeronautics research related to identifying noise sources in free jets, as well as applications in supersonic and hypersonic flows where measurement of flow properties, including mass flux, is required in the presence of shocks and ionization occurrence.