CFD study of the flow field driven by interacting jets in a generic enclosure

Mixing ventilation flows consisting of interacting jets (as in airplane cabins) can be highly turbulent and unsteady. The aim of this study is to assess the performance of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations in predicting the isothermal flow resulting from interacting wall jets in a generic enclosure. Three k-ε turbulence models are employed: the standard k-ε and RNG k-ε models with near-wall modelling, and a low-Reynolds number version of the k-ε model. Comparison of the simulations with (time-averaged) PIV measurements reveals a good overall prediction of the velocity and turbulent kinetic energy by all models. Local deviations from the experiments can be attributed to the inability of the steady RANS method to capture the unsteady jet interaction.