Direct numerical simulation of turbulent heat transfer in an axially rotating pipe flow: Reynolds shear stress and scalar flux budgets

A direct numerical simulation with turbulent transport of a scalar quantity has been carried out to grasp and understand a laminarization phenomena caused by a pipe rotation. In this study, the Reynolds number, which is based on a bulk velocity and a pipe diameter, was set to be constant; Re_b=5283, and the rotating ratios of a wall velocity to a bulk velocity were set to be 0.5, 1.0, 2.0 and 3.0. A uniform heat‐flux was applied to the wall as a thermal boundary condition. Prandtl number of the working fluid was assumed to be 0.71. The number of computational grids used in this study was 256×128×128 in the z‐, r‐ and ϕ‐ directions, respectively. The turbulent quantities such as the mean flow, temperature fluctuations, turbulent stresses and pressure distribution and the turbulent statistics were obtained. Moreover, the Reynolds stress and the scalar flux budgets were also obtained for each rotating ratio. The turbulent drag decreases with the rotating ratio increase. The reason of this drag reduction can be considered that the additional rotational production terms appear in the azimuthal turbulence component. The contributions of convection and production terms to the radial scalar flux budget and also to the balance with temperature‐pressure gradient term are significant. The dissipation and viscous diffusion terms are negligible in higher rotating ratio.