Vortical structures and heat transfer in a round impinging jet

In order to gain a better insight into flow, vortical and turbulence structure and their correlation with the local heat transfer in impinging flows, we performed large-eddy simulations (LES) of a round normally impinging jet issuing from a long pipe at Reynolds number Re = 20000 at the orifice-to-plate distance H=2D, where D is the jet-nozzle diameter. This configuration was chosen to match previous experiments in which several phenomena have been detected, but the underlying physics remained obscure because of limitations in the measuring techniques applied. The instantaneous velocity and temperature fields, generated by the LES, revealed interesting time and spatial dynamics of the vorticity and eddy structures and their imprints on the target wall, characterized by tilting and breaking of the edge ring vortices before impingement, flapping, precessing, splitting and pairing of the stagnation point/line, local unsteady separation and flow reversal at the onset of radial jet spreading, streaks pairing and branching in the near-wall region of the radial jets, and others. The LES data provided also a basis for plausible explanations of some of the experimentally detected statistically-averaged flow features such as double peaks in the Nusselt number and the negative production of turbulence energy in the stagnation region. The simulations, performed with an in-house unstructured finite-volume code T-FlowS, using second-order-accuracy discretization schemes for space and time and the dynamic subgrid-scale stress/flux model for unresolved motion, showed large sensitivity of the results to the grid resolution especially in the wall vicinity, suggesting care must be taken in interpreting LES results in impinging flows.