Proceedingsthof the 37th National & 4th International Conference on Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Power

Proceedings of the 37 National and 4th International
Conference on Fluid Mechanics and Fluid Power
December 16-18, 2010, IIT Madras, Chennai, India.
December 16–18, 2010, IIT Madras, Chennai, India
FMFP10 - AM - 07
FMFP10 - AM - 07

TURBULENT PULSATING FLOW THROUGH CIRCULAR DUCTS

Eric Werzner Subhashis Ray*

Institute of Thermal Engineering Institute of Thermal Engineering
Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg
Gustav-Zeuner-Straße 7 Gustav-Zeuner-Straße 7,
D – 09596, Freiberg, Germany D – 09596, Freiberg, Germany
email: eric.werzner@gmx.de emails: juhp_sray@yahoo.co.in
ray@iwtt.tu-freiberg.de
*
corresponding author

Dimosthenis Trimis
Institute of Thermal Engineering
Technische Universität Bergakademie Freiberg
Gustav-Zeuner-Straße 7
D – 09596, Freiberg, Germany
email: trimis@iwtt.tu-freiberg.de

ABSTRACT experiments have also been presented for compari-

In the present paper, a numerical method has been
demonstrated which works on an overall Newton-
Raphson type algorithm and is capable of solving
the “inverse” problem for turbulent, fully-
developed, pulsating pipe flows, where the mass
flow rate, rather than the pressure gradient is pre-
scribed as a periodic function of time. The momen-
tum equation, governing the transient, fully-
developed pulsating flow of an incompressible fluid
through a circular duct has been considered. Turbu-
lence has been addressed by employing the low
Reynolds number k " ! model. From the numerical
solutions, the ratio of amplitudes of the mass flow
rate and the pressure gradient signals along with
their phase difference have been presented as func-
tions of dimensionless pulsating frequency in the
form of a signature map. The results of preliminary
son. Further, the results for low frequency pulsa-
tions have also been obtained using the Blasius
equation for friction factor and are found to com-
pare well both with the experiments and the nu-
merical results.
Keywords: Fully-developed, Pulsating, Turbulent,
Pipe flow, Low-Re k-! model
INTRODUCTION
Pulsating flows appear in various areas of engineer-
ing and natural sciences. They not only play an
important role in the operations of IC engines,
pumps, nuclear power systems, etc., but are also of
immense interest for better understanding of human
breathing or blood flow through arteries and hence,
have received considerable attention over the years.

1
Being characterized by a mean flow rate, superim-
posed by time-periodic oscillations, pulsating flows
demand for instantaneous flow rate measurements.
An accurate mass flow rate measurement technique
for laminar, fully developed, pulsating pipe flows
was developed by Ünsal et al. (2006a, 2006b)
which utilizes a unique relationship between mass
flow rate to pressure gradient amplitude ratio, their
phase difference and pulsation frequency. The un-
derlying analytical solution for such relationship is
already well documented in the literature. Origi-
nally derived by Lambossy (1952) for harmonic
pulsations and subsequently extended by Uchida
(1956) for arbitrary time periodic pulsations, Ray et
al. (2005) generalized the solution by introducing Fig. 1: Variation of amplitude ratio mA*/PA* and
appropriate dimensionless quantities. For simple, phase lag !" with dimensionless frequency F for
sinusoidally pulsating, laminar, fully developed laminar, fully developed, sinusoidally pulsating
pipe flows, these are identified as the normalized pipe flow.
mass flow rate amplitude m! *A # m! A m! M , the nor-
malized pressure gradient amplitude The application of the proposed measurement tech-
nology, however, is currently limited only to lami-
PA * # $dp dx % A $dp dx %M and the dimensionless
nar pulsating flows since there is no adequate
pulsation frequency F # R 2 f P & of the pulsation. knowledge available for a corresponding signature
In these expressions, the subscripts, A and M cor- map under turbulent flow conditions. This issue is
respond to the amplitudes and time-averages, re- primarily addressed in the present paper. In order to
spectively, of the mass flow rate m! and the pres- achieve this goal, numerical simulations were car-
sure gradient dp dx . Further, R is the pipe radius, ried out for pipe flows with different pulsation fre-
f P is the pulsation frequency and & is the kine- quencies using the well-established and widely
used low-Reynolds-number k-# turbulence model of
matic viscosity of the fluid. Ray et al. (2005)
Launder and Sharma (1974). The resultant phase
showed that the amplitude ratio m! *A PA* and the shift and amplitude ratio values, as functions of
phase lag (' between the mass flow rate and the dimensionless frequency, are presented in the non-
pressure gradient signals could be expressed as dimensional form suggested by Ray et al. (2005)
functions only of dimensionless pulsation fre- for the sake of comparison. Since such a descrip-
quency F , those can be further presented in the tion assumes a linear relationship between mass
form of a characteristic signature map (see Fig. 1). flow rate and pressure gradient, which is not valid
Hence, it is possible to obtain the mass flow rate for heavily modulated turbulent flows, a small
oscillation for any known pressure gradient oscilla- modulation amplitude of m! *A # 0.1 was chosen for
tion for laminar, fully developed, pulsating pipe
all the simulation, presented in the paper. In order
flow. Analytical and experimental investigations by
to compare the results from present simulations
Ünsal et al. (2005) and Durst et al. (2007) demon-
with the existing experimental data, those were
strated as well that the time-dependent mass flow
obtained by employing a mass flow rate controller,
rate of flows with arbitrary pulsations could be ac-
it was necessary to prescribe the mass flow rate,
curately reconstructed by superposition of the indi-
rather than the pressure gradient, as functions of
vidual solutions for the harmonic components,
time. Hence, the so-called inverse problem, where
which can be obtained through a Fourier analysis of
the required pressure gradient is not known a priori,
the pressure gradient signal.
was solved.

2
The present article is organized in the following the dissipation rate of turbulent kinetic energy and
manner. The following section explains the nu- f 9 is a damping function, introduced in order to
merical approach, which was used for the flow improve the near-wall behaviour. According to
modelling and the method for solving the inverse Launder and Sharma (1974), it is calculated in the
problem. Then, an approximation for calculation of following manner;
an amplitude ratio m! *A PA* for the limiting case of
very low pulsation frequency is presented. In the
next section, the results are presented and verified
:
f 9 # exp " 3.4 $1 7 RT / 50%
2
; (4)

through comparison with existing experimental

The transport equations for k and ! are given as;
data. Finally, conclusions of this research effort are 2
2
provided with a brief outlook for further studies. 6k 1 6 . 6k + 4 6u 1 46 k 1
# , r $
& 7 & T % ) 7 & T2 / " 2& 22 / "!
/
6t r 6r - 6r * 3 6r 0 3 6r 0
NUMERICAL METHOD
(5)
2
Governing Equations and Solution Procedure 6! 1 6 . 4 & t 1 6! + c1& T ! 4 6u 1 c2 f 2! 2
# ,r 2& 7 // ) 7 2 / "
6t r 6r - 23 < ! 0 6r * k 3 6r 0 k
For the present analysis, the pipe flow is assumed 2
to be fully-developed (i.e., with no transverse ve- 4 6 ²u 1
7 2&& T 2 / (6)
locity components and with vanishing gradients in 3 6r ² 0
the axial direction for all variables, except the pres-
sure gradient, which is assumed to be constant) and with the following model constants and functions:
hence, it can be treated as a transient, one-
dimensional problem. The governing momentum c9 # 0.09 ; c1 # 1.44 ; c2 # 1.92 ; < ! # 1.3
equation for isothermal, incompressible, turbulent
pipe flow in cylindrical coordinates is given as $
f 2 # 1 " 0.3 exp " RT
2
% (7)

6u 1 dp 1 6 . 4 6u 1+ While Eq.(1) allows for a straightforward calcula-

#" 7 , r 2& " u 5v 5 /) (1) tion of the velocity distribution as functions of time
6t 8 dx r 6r - 3 6r 0*
and space (radius) and hence, the mass flow rate,
for a known pressure gradient, the actual problem,
with dp dx being the axial pressure gradient however, required solution for prescribed mass
(which is only a function of time). The Reynolds flow rate, for which, the required pressure gradient
stress term u 5v 5 can be described as product of the is to be determined. In order to find out the corre-
eddy viscosity & T and the radial gradient of mean sponding pressure gradient in an iterative manner,
velocity according to the Boussinesq approximation: the Newton Raphson method was used. It is evident
from Eqs.(1)–(7) that if pressure gradient is guessed
6u as a function of time, the velocity distribution could
" u 5v 5 # & T (2) be obtained by solving these equations and hence,
6r the mass flow rate could be obtained. Symbolically,
therefore, one may express the resultant mass flow
The turbulent kinematic viscosity, appearing in rate as a function of guessed pressure gradient,
Eq.(2), is obtained from the following relation; which varies with time. This calculated mass flow
rate, however, would be incorrect if the guessed
k2
& T # c9 f 9 (3) pressure gradient is wrong. As a result, the guessed
! pressure gradient requires correction, which is ob-
tained using the Newton-Raphson method. This
where k denotes the turbulent kinetic energy, ! is method employs the derivative of the obtained

3
mass flow rate corresponding to a previously sionless amplitude ratio m! *A PA* approaches a lim-
guessed pressure gradient dp dx O in order to cal- iting value corresponding to the pressure loss under
culate a new guess value for the pressure gradient steady turbulent pipe flow. An approximation for
small mass flow rate amplitudes m! *A in order to
N
dp dx in the following manner:
compute this number is explained below.
N
dp dx # dp dx O 7
:
m! " m! $dp dx %
O
;
:
m! 5 $dp dx %
O
; (8) The pressure gradient dp dx relates to the friction
factor f as follows;
: ;
where, m! 5 $dp dx % is the derivative of mass flow
O

dp f8u 2
rate with respect to the guessed pressure gradient # (10)
and is computed numerically as; dx 4R

; m! :$dp dx% ; : ; (9)

7 ! NR " m! $dp dx %O As already introduced, the definition of the dimen-
:
O
m! 5 $dp dx % #
O
sionless amplitude ratio m! *A PA* for known m! *A is
! NR
given as;
In the above equation ! NR is a predetermined small
m! *A m! *A
number, which was set to 10-5 for all the calcula- # (11)
tions. The iterative process is terminated when the PA* $dp / dx % A $dp / dx %M
absolute difference between the prescribed and the
calculated mass flow rates dropped below 10-6. Assuming a linear relationship between the pres-
sure gradient and the mass flow rate, which is justi-
The computations for forward integrations (i.e., by fied only for small m! *A (see Fig. 2), the pressure
assuming the pressure gradient to be known) were gradient amplitude may also be expressed as;
performed using a finite-volume based solution
method, which is second-order accurate in both d$dp dx %
time and space. Altogether 80 unevenly distributed $dp dx % A # = m! A (12)
control volumes, with grid points located at the cell dm! m! M
centres and boundaries, were chosen for all the
computations after carrying out a systematic grid where d$dp dx % dm! m! is the slope of pressure gra-
independence study. The first grid node was placed M

dient with respect to mass flow rate at the point of

at a dimensionless distance of y 7 # 0.7 from the
the mean mass flow rate m! M . Replacing m! A by
wall. Sufficient time resolution could be achieved
through at least 200 calculated steps per period.
Time-invariance of the solution was considered to m! A # m! M = m! *A (13)
be fulfilled when the velocities for each and every
phase angle between two time periods changed by allows one to rewrite Eq. (11) as;
less than 10-5.
"1
m! *A 42 d$dp dx % m! M 1
/
Theoretical Solution for Quasi-Steady Case # = (14)
m! M $dp / dx %M
PA 23 dm!
* /
0
With decreasing pulsation frequency, inertia effects
become small as compared to frictional losses and Eqation (14) can be reformulated using the continu-
the flow starts to behave in a quasi-steady manner. ity equation m! # 8u>R 2 , the Reynolds number
Under these conditions, the phase shift almost van-
ishes for all practical purposes and the dimen- definition Re # 2 Ru M & and Eq.(10) in a way that

4
deriving the differential term delivers the limiting This value represents a significant difference as
value of m! *A PA* in the following dependence: compared to the laminar flow case, where the am-
plitude ratio is unity for low frequency pulsations.
"1
m! *A 42 df Re M 1/ RESULTS AND DISCUSSION
# 2 7 = (15)
PA* 23 d Re Re M f $Re M % /0
First of all, the performance of the Low-Re k-! tur-
bulence model is verified for steady flow through a
comparison of the friction factor with experimental
data from an earlier investigation and the Blasius
function (see Fig. 3). Except for a slight underpre-
diction, the results show reasonable agreement.

Fig. 2: Example of dependence of pressure gradient

on mass flow rate within flow rate modulation
range in quasi-steady flow (mA* = 0.1).

The friction factor f $Re M % and its slope

df dRe Re can be obtained in different ways. One Fig. 3: Steady pipe flow characteristic: Friction
M

would be to employ the friction factor correlation factor f with respect to Reynolds number Re.
of Colebrook (1939);
The transient flow simulations were carried out for
a bandwidth of pulsation frequencies F, ranging
1 4k R 2.51 1
# "2 log10 2 P 7 / (16) from 0.1 to 100. Thereby, dimensionless amplitude
2 /
f 3 7.4 Re f 0 m! *A of the sinusoidal mass flow modulation was set
to 0.1 and the mean Reynolds number remained
which has to be iteratively solved and numerically constant at 9600.
derived. Rather than that, a direct solution is
achieved when plugging in the simpler Blasius Examining the time signals of selected runs dis-
equation (Bird et al., 2002); played in Fig. 4, one can recognize an increase of
pressure gradient amplitude and phase lag with
0.0791 rising frequency.
f # 4= (17)
Re1 4
The signature map shown in Fig. 5 allows a more
that assumes a hydraulically smooth pipe wall. detailed investigation of this variation. As expected,
Analytical derivation of Eq.(15) then leads to a Re- a characteristic frequency dependence with differ-
independent solution; ent flow regimes is found. For slow pulsations, the
pressure gradient follows the imposed mass flow
"1 rate with constant amplitude ratio and almost non-
m! *A 4 11 4 existing phase lag. With rising frequency, the phase
*
# 2 2 " / # # 0.571 (18)
PA 3 40 7 lag increases up to a value of > / 2 while the ampli-

5
tude ratio decreases and approaches zero. Com- for better comparison. Furthermore, higher order
pared to the laminar flow case (Fig. 1), this transi- turbulence models, e.g. algebraic or Reynolds stress
tion occurs shifted towards higher frequency, which models should be tried for modelling the Reynolds
can be explained with the higher frictional losses stress terms.
predominating the fluid inertia. Also, instead of
being unity, the amplitude ratio approaches a much
smaller value at the lower end of the frequency
range. This is confirmed nicely by the theoretical
predicted value and the experimental results. Going
on for higher frequencies, it can be seen that the
transition takes place a little earlier than in the ex-
periments. The increasing deviation of experimen-
tally and numerically obtained phase lag for higher
frequency is supposed to be a result of starting
compressibility.

FIG. 5: Variation of mA*/PA* and !" with F

for Re = 9600.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

One of the authors, Eric Werzner, gratefully ac-

knowledges the support of Masanori Aritomi, Hi-
roshige Kikura and Hideharu Takahashi from To-
kyo Institute of Technology, where the experiments
were conducted. This work was partially financed
through Freunde und Förderer der TU Berga-
FIG. 4: Comparison of the normalized pressure kademie Freiberg e.V.
gradient (dp/dx)* for different dimensionless pulsa-
tion frequencies, F = 0.1, 2.5, 6.3, 10, 16, 25, 32, NOMENCLATURE
40, 50 (outwards), Re = 9600.
c 9 , c1 , constants in k-# model
CONCLUSIONS c2
dp d z axial pressure gradient
The present investigation confirms the existence of
a characteristic frequency dependence of mass flow f Darcy friction factor
rate to pressure gradient amplitude ratio and phase fP pulsation frequency
shift in fully developed, turbulent, pulsating pipe f9 , f2 functions in the k-# model
flow. The Low-Re k-# model turned out to be suit-
F dimensionless pulsation frequency
able for modelling this problem. Furthermore, it
was shown that the amplitude ratio for quasi-steady ( # R2 fP & )
pulsations can be well predicted. k turbulent kinetic energy
kP pipe roughness
In the future, reliable experimental data on flow m! mass flow rate
velocity and Reynolds stresses should be obtained

6
m! *A dimensionless mass flow rate modulation Pipes With Particular Reference to the Transi-
amplitude ( # m! A m! M ) tion Region Between the Smooth and Rough
dimensionless pressure gradient ampli- Pipe Laws, J. Inst. Civ. Eng. 11, 133.
PA*
tude [ # $dp dx % A $dp dx %M ] 3. Launder, B. E., Sharma, B. I., 1974. Applica-
tion of the Energy-Dissipation Model of Tur-
r radial coordinate bulence to the Calculation of Flow Near a
R pipe radius Spinning Disc, Letters in Heat and Mass Trans-
Re Reynolds number ( # 2 Ru M & ) fer 1, 131.
RT turbulent Reynolds number [ # k $&! % ]
2 4. Durst, F., Heim, U., Ünsal, B., Kullik, G., 2003.
Reynolds shear stress Mass flow rate control system for time-
u 5v 5 dependent laminar and turbulent flow investi-
y7 dimensionless wall distance ( # yu? /& ) gations, Meas. Sci. Technol. 14, 893.
z axial coordinate 5. Durst, F., Uensal, B., Ray, S., Trimis, D., 2007.
Method for defined mass flow rate variations
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! turbulent kinetic energy dissipation rate Science and Technology, 18, 790 – 802.
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(' phase lag tube rigide et horizontal. Calcul de la force de
& kinematic viscosity frottement, Helv. Physica Acta 25, 371.
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Subscripts
333.
9. Ünsal, B., Trimis, D., Durst, F., 2006a. Instan-
A amplitude
taneous mass flowrate measurements through
M time-average
fuel injection nozzles, Int. J. Engine Research 7
(5) 371.
Superscripts
10. Ünsal, B., Trimis, D., Durst, F., 2006b. Instan-
taneous Mass Flow Rate Measurements for
N new
Piezo-Driven Fuel Injection Systems, Proc. 7th
O old
International Symp. on internal combustion di-
agnostics, 240.
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O., 2005. Mass flow rate controlled fully de-
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