Analysis of coherent structures in the near-field region of an isothermal free swirling jet after vortex breakdown

This work is focused on the near-exit region of a round isothermal free swirling jet to characterize the effect of swirl on the flow field and dominant coherent structures. Most of the work in this field investigated jets produced by vane swirl generators, whereas in our case an axial plus tangential swirl generator without a center-body was used. Stereoscopic PIV has been employed to capture the instantaneous flow field for Reynolds number equal to 21,800 and two swirl levels (0 and 1.4). A proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) applied to the instantaneous velocity vector fields allowed to identify the dominant flow structures associated with the precessing vortex core (PVC). The time coefficients of the most energetic first two POD modes were used to reconstruct the phase of the fluctuating motion in the swirling flow. The phase information was used to conditionally average the instantaneous velocity fields and swirl strength maps; this allowed to reconstruct the 3D structure of the PVC from the 2D data. Overlapping phase slots were used to improve the quality of the reconstructed 3D structure. The minima of negative swirling strength revealed the presence of two co-winding helical structures located in the inner and outer shear layers. The helical structures wind opposite to the base flow rotation and disappear at an axial location of approximately x D = 1.5. Detailed analysis of the mean, phase averaged and POD modes velocity fields are also reported to further highlight the flow field features. The third and fourth transverse POD modes evidenced the presence of a |m| = 2 azimuthal wave buried in the dominant |m| = 1 wave; such wave belong to a vortex pair superimposed to the precessing vortex core. Close to the nozzle exit, the analysis of the coherent and random parts of the velocity fluctuations evidenced that the PVC slightly increases the stochastic velocity fluctuations, but the latter resulted to be more isotropic respect to the non-swirling case. Our results put into evidence that the combined application of PIV, POD and phase averaging techniques can provide detailed observations of coherent fluctuations induced by vortex precession. The latter can help to improve the understanding of PVC and VB and to find possible strategies to prevent/control their formation. Finally, they can be of interest to develop numerical models for the simulation of these complex flows.