Turbulent velocity profiles in a tilted heat pipe

In this paper, we analyze the mean velocity profile and the Reynolds shear stress in a turbulent, inclined, heat pipe. We show that the simplest version of a mixing length model is unable to reproduce the evolution of the velocity profile shape with the inclination angle ψ. An improvement of this model, taking into account some buoyancy effects, gives nice qualitative agreement with the observations. The agreement implies a low value for the gradient Richardson number Ric above which the flow is laminar. While such a low value (Ric ≃ 0.05) is surprising, we found it in agreement with published experimental data, when the information given allowed to calculate the gradient Richardson number Ri.