CFD simulations of two rectangular water jets impinging on a water pool

CFD simulations of two water jets emanating from rectangular pipes of large aspect ratio and impinging on a water pool are performed using the commercial CFD software ANSYS Fluent. Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with a number of turbulence models, namely the SA, k-ϵ and SST k-ω are solved. The computations are compared with the experimental data to assess the accuracy of various turbulence models. It is shown that majority of the details of the flow field during the initial phase of jets interaction and intermediate phase of jets merging are best captured by k-ϵ model but the final phase of combining of two jets into a single jet are best captured by the SST k-ω model due to its shear stress transport correction. The process of evolution of interaction of two jets from the initial phase to final phase is described in detail.