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Going Nuclear: Notes from the officially unofficial book tour
I work in the analytical labs at one of Europe’s oldest and largest nuclear sites: Sellafield, in northwestern England. I spend my days at the fume hood front, pipette in one hand and radiation probe in the other (and dosimeter pinned to my chest, of course). Outside the lab, I have a second job: I moonlight as a writer and public speaker. My new popular science book—Going Nuclear: How the Atom Will Save the World—came out last summer, and it feels like my life has been running at full power ever since.
Benedikt Krohn, Sunming Qin, John Downing, Victor Petrov, Annalisa Manera
Nuclear Science and Engineering | Volume 193 | Number 1 | January-February 2019 | Pages 171-184
Technical Paper – Selected papers from NURETH 2017 | doi.org/10.1080/00295639.2018.1507360
Articles are hosted by Taylor and Francis Online.
Turbulent free jets play an important role to understand turbulence and momentum transport in free shear layers. The characteristic nature of this type of flow has attracted the focus of many scientists within the past century, and a large body of literature describes the dynamics in the near-field region as well as the self-similar region. Recent investigations attempt to understand the intermediate fields, called the mixing transition or the route to self-similarity. In light of this mixing transition hypothesis for jets, an apparent gap is recognized among the scientific community with two main conjectures being put forth. First, the flow will always asymptotically reach a fully self-similar state if boundary conditions permit. The second proposes partial and local self-similarity within the mixing transition. In the present work we address this topic with an experimental investigation of the intermediate-field turbulence dynamics in a nonconfined free jet with a nozzle diameter of 12.7 mm. The outer-scale Reynolds number is 15 000, and high-speed particle image velocimetry is used to record the velocity fields with a final spatial resolution of 194 × 194 µm2. The analysis focuses on higher-order moments and two-point correlations of velocity variances in space and time. We observe interactions among turbulent structures that show local self-similarity and partial coherence.