Stochastic nature of three dimensional bursting events and sediment entrainment in vortex chamber

Abstract

In this study, three dimensional quadrant analysis of bursting process was used to recognize the susceptible regions for sediment entrainment and deposition at the bed of a vortex chamber. From the analysis, it was found that two dimensional quadrant analysis in unable to find the turbulent coherent structure of flow near the bed of the vortex chamber. Therefore, a new method based on three dimensional bursting process is introduced in this study to define the turbulent flow structure. Based on the new methodology in this study, the bursting event is divided into eight different cube zones according to three dimensional velocity fluctuations. It was realized that, four cube zones interactions are toward the central orifice of the vortex chamber and four cube zones interactions are toward the wall of the chamber and they are categorized as classes A and B, respectively. The results from the experiments showed that in class A, the internal sweep events (class IV-A) moves the settled sediment particles toward the central orifice of the chamber, whereas in class B the external sweep events (class IV-B) moves the settled sediment particles toward the external region of the chamber. Also the transition probabilities of the bursting events in 64 particular movements were determined. The result showed that stable organizations of each class of the events had highest transition probabilities whereas cross organizations had lowest transition probabilities. Additionally, an effort was made to find the average inclination angle of the three dimensional bursting events in each cube zone. The results showed that near the bed of the vortex chamber by increasing the tangential velocity toward the center of the chamber, the average inclination angle of the events in the cube zones decreased. Also, at the region where the sediment particles were deposited, the inclination angles had higher values.