Control of a submerged jet in a thin rectangular cavity

An innovative method is presented for control of an oscillatory turbulent jet in a thin rectangular cavity with a thickness to width ratio of 0.16. Jet flow control is achieved by mass injection of a secondary jet into the region above the submerged primary jet nozzle exit and perpendicular to the primary nozzle axis. An experimental model, a 2-D and a 3-D computational fluid dynamics (CFD) model are used to investigate the flow characteristics under various secondary injection mass flow rates and injection positions. Two-dimensional laser Doppler anemometry (LDA) measurements are compared with results from the CFD models, which incorporate a standard k–ε turbulence model or a 2-D and 3-D realisable k–ε model. Experimental results show deflection angles up to 23.3° for 24.6% of relative secondary mass flow are possible. The key to high jet control sensitivity is found to be lateral jet momentum with the optimum injection position at 12% of cavity width (31.6% of the primary nozzle length) above the primary nozzle exit. CFD results also show that a standard k–ε turbulence closure with nonequilibrium wall functions provides the best predictions of the flow.