A comparison of different methods for estimating turbulent dissipation rate in under-resolved flow fields from synthetic PIV images

Abstract The turbulent energy dissipation rate is an important parameter that determines the transfer rates of mass, heat and momentum in chemical engineering industry. Especially in a multiphase reactor, the local instantaneous turbulent dissipation rate affects the breakage and coalescence of bubbles or droplets. To directly determine the local turbulent dissipation rate, fluctuating velocity gradients have to be measured down to the Kolmogorov length scale. This paper compares the advantages and disadvantages of three different methods, namely, correlation method, optical flow method and hybrid method, in the evaluation of velocity fields, which are subsequently used to calculate the turbulent dissipation rate. An instantaneous flow field of homogeneous isotropic turbulence from DNS results is used as a benchmark. The velocity field and turbulent dissipation rate field obtained by these three methods are compared to the DNS results. It is shown that the hybrid method performs better in both velocity field evaluation and local turbulent dissipation rate estimation compared to the other two methods. This is because the hybrid method combines the advantages of the correlation method in achieving a stable averaged velocity field and the optical flow method in achieving pixel-level resolution measurement of the flow field.