Abstract
Sea-spray droplets ejected into the marine atmospheric boundary layer take part in a series of complex transport processes. By capturing the air-droplet coupling and feedback, we focus on how droplets modify the total heat transfer across a turbulent boundary layer. We implement a high-resolution Eulerian–Lagrangian algorithm with varied droplet size and mass loading in a turbulent open-channel flow, revealing that the influence from evaporating droplets varies for different dynamic and thermodynamic characteristics of droplets. Droplets that both respond rapidly to the ambient environment and have long suspension times are able to modify the latent and sensible heat fluxes individually, however the competing signs of this modification lead to an overall weak effect on the total heat flux. On the other hand, droplets with a slower thermodynamic response to the environment are less subjected to this compensating effect. This indicates a potential to enhance the total heat flux, but the enhancement is highly dependent on the concentration and suspension time.
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Acknowledgements
This work was supported by the National Science Foundation (NSF) under Grant No. AGS-1429921. The authors would like to thank the Computing Research Center at the University of Notre Dame for computational support. The authors would also like to acknowledge high-performance computing support from Yellowstone (UNDM0004), maintained by the Computational Information Systems Laboratory at the National Center for Atmospheric Research (NCAR). NCAR is supported by the NSF. To obtain digitized data of figures, please visit https://curate.nd.edu/show/k930bv75t3z (DOI: 10.7274/R01C1TT5).
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Peng, T., Richter, D. Influence of Evaporating Droplets in the Turbulent Marine Atmospheric Boundary Layer. Boundary-Layer Meteorol 165, 497–518 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-017-0285-7
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s10546-017-0285-7