An Experimental and Numerical Study of the Isothermal Flowfield Behind a Bluff Body Flameholder

An experiment and numerical investigation was conducted to study the turbulent velocities and stresses behind a two-dimensional bluff body. Simultaneous three-component laser-Doppler velocimeter (LDV) measurements were made in the isothermal incompressible turbulent flowfield downstream of a bluff body placed at mid-stream in a rectangular test section. Mean velocities and Reynolds stresses were measured at various axial positions. Spanwise velocity measurements indicated that the flow is three dimensional in the recirculation zone of the bluff body. Confidence in the accuracy of the data was gained by calculating the mass fluxes at each axial station. These were found to agree with each other to within +/-3 percent. A parallel Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study was initiated to gage the predictive accuracy of currently available CFD techniques. Three solutions were computed: a two-dimensional steady-state solution using the standard k-epsilon model, a two-dimensional time-accurate solution using the standard k-epsilon model, and a two-dimensional time-accurate solution using a Renormalized-Group (RNG) k-epsilon turbulence model. The steady-state solution matched poorly with the data, severely underpredicting the Reynolds stresses in the recirculation zone. The time-accurate solutions captured the unsteady vortex shedding from the base of the bluff body, providing a source for the higher Reynolds stresses. The RNG k-epsilon solution provided the best match to the data.