Wall temperature fluctuations measurements downstream of a pipe junction using infrared thermography

Abstract

Thermal fatigue issue is of concern when two flows with large temperature differences are mixing. In this study, a hot cylindrical pipe flow comes out in a cold main straight channel flow through an orthogonal junction to experimentally reproduce thermal stresses. This work aims to investigate temperature fields at the wall of two turbulent water flows mixing at a low velocity ratio (i.e. secondary pipe flow velocity to main flow velocity ratio). As infrared measurements are difficult to perform because of the semi-transparent properties of liquid water, we focus on the development of a specific infrared thermography procedure to get wall temperature fields downstream of the mixing region.

Keywords:

• non isothermal mixing
• tee junction
• turbulent flow

Acknowledgements

The authors would like to thank AREVA technical centre of Le Creusot for their helpful support, collaboration and useful discussions.