Experimental study on gravity currents flowing on heated walls

Abstract

We present an experimental study on steady gravity currents advancing along a heated wall. The current is generated by a mixture of air and carbon dioxide continuously supplied at the channel inlet. To have a complete point-wise characterization of the flow, simultaneous high-frequency measurements of two velocity components, CO_2 concentration, and temperature are performed. An experimental protocol is presented to reconstruct the local fluid density and to estimate turbulent vertical and horizontal fluxes of CO_2, temperature, and buoyancy. The reliability of both the flow measurements and of the estimate of convective heat flux exchanged at the wall is assessed through integral balances of \textnormal{CO}$_2$ mass, enthalpy, and buoyancy, performed at different distances from the source. Three wall-heating conditions are considered: an adiabatic case, a moderately heated case, and a strongly heated case. In the heated experiments, a convectively unstable boundary layer forms near the wall, capped by a stably stratified region. The influence of this condition on the first- and second-order flow statistics profiles is examined. Although wall heating influences the vertical shear, the Brunt-Vaisala frequency, and both shear and buoyancy production of turbulent kinetic energy within the stably-stratified region characterized by an almost constant vertical gradient of streamwise velocity, neither the gradient Richardson number nor the flux Richardson number exhibits a clear trend in this region with the imposed wall heat flux.