An experimental study on turbulent mixing of high-Schmidt-number scalar in grid turbulence by means of PIV and PLIF

Turbulent mixing of high-Schmidt-number passive scalar in shear-free grid turbulence is experimentally investigated using a water channel. The Reynolds number based on the mesh size of the grid and cross-sectionally averaged mean velocity is 2, 500. Rhodamine B (fluorescent dye) was used as a high-Schmidt-number passive scalar. The Schmidt number is about 2, 100. The time-resolved particle image velocimetry (PIV) and the planar laser induced fluorescence (PLIF) technique were used to measure instantaneous two-component velocities and nondimensional concentration. Our PLIF algorithm corrects the following errors: spatiotemporal variation of local excitation intensity due to an inhomogeneous concentration field along the light path, time variation of fluorescence quantum yield, and spatiotemporal variation of incident laser intensity. The results show that the vertical profile of mean scalar can be well approximated by the error function. In contrast, the profile of scalar variance in outer region of the mixing layer cannot be approximated by the Gaussian profile. In addition, the half width of mean scalar is larger than that of the scalar variance profile.