Insights derived from CFD studies on the evolution of planar wall jets

The main objective of this paper is to demonstrate that a simple and cost-effective 2D Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulation approach can often be efficiently used in industrial design applications. We simplified the designing approach of a racetrack jet dryer to a problem involving the streamwise evolution of an offset wall jet. We compared our simple 2D RANS simulations with experiments and large eddy simulation (LES), and were encouraged to see that our simplified approach produced a better correlation with the experiments compared to LES, which is expected to be much more accurate (even though computationally orders of magnitude more expensive). We conclude that under certain circumstances a simple 2D approach can lead to a dependable solution. Additionally, we used the results from these simulations to enhance our understanding of the evolution of offset wall jets. The insights derived from these simulations suggest the existence of scaling parameters that can express offset wall jets as a family of self-similar flows