A spatially advancing turbulent flow and heat transfer in a curved channel

Direct numerical simulation was performed for a spatially advancing turbulent flow and heat transfer in a two‐dimensional curved channel, where one wall was heated to a constant temperature and the other wall was cooled to a different constant temperature. In the simulation, fully developed flow and temperature from the straight‐channel driver was passed through the inlet of the curved‐channel domain. The frictional Reynolds number was assigned 150, and the Prandtl number was given 0.71. Since the flow field was examined in the previous paper, the thermal features are mainly targeted in this paper. The turbulent heat flux showed trends consistent with a growing process of large‐scale vortices. In the curved part, the wall‐normal component of the turbulent heat flux was twice as large as the counterpart in the straight part, suggesting active heat transport of large‐scale vortices. In the inner side of the same section, temperature fluctuation was abnormally large compared with the modest fluctuation of the wall‐normal velocity. This was caused by the combined effect of the large‐scale motion of the vortices and the wide variation of the mean temperature; in such a temperature distribution, large‐scale ejection of the hot fluid near the outer wall, which is transported into the near inner‐wall region, should have a large impact on the thermal boundary layer near the inner wall. Wave number decomposition was conducted for various statistics, which showed that the contribution of the large‐scale vortex to the total turbulent heat flux normal to the wall reached roughly 80% inside the channel 135^° downstream from the curved‐channel inlet. © 2009 Wiley Periodicals, Inc. Heat Trans Asian Res; Published online in Wiley InterScience ( www.interscience.wiley.com ). DOI 10.1002/htj.20275