DOI: 10.1615/TSFP3
PIV MEASUREMENTS OF CONFINED SWIRLING FLOW
RESUMO
The paper reports an experimental study of the highly swirling flowfield typical of a gas-turbine fuel injector. An isothermal (water flow) experiment is conducted to measure the time-mean and instantaneous aerodynamic behaviour. The PN technique is used for data gathering. Validation tests are carried out with various fields of views to ensure that the PN interrogation window size is small enough in comparison with local turbulent length scales to avoid loss of turbulence information during the cross-correlation evaluation. The time-averaged flowfield displays many classical characteristics of high swirl number shear flows. Interesting features are revealed on examination of the instantaneous data. These include a rotating four-vortex pattern issuing from the swirler stream, and a precessing vortex core. Detailed information is presented on these unsteady features so that the data set represents a challenging test case for LES methods.