Numerical Study of Dual-Plume Interference in a Turbulent Boundary Layer

Direct numerical simulation is used to investigate the interference arising from the dispersion of passive scalar plumes released from a pair of point sources in a fully-developed wall-bounded shear flow. Four different lateral separations of the two sources for both near ground-level and elevated releases are considered. The downwind evolution of the correlation between the plume concentrations along the centreline between the two sources and the behaviour of the lateral profiles of the correlation at various locations downwind of the two sources are examined in detail. Differences in the exceedance probability over a high concentration level for a single plume and the total plume are highlighted and studied, and the effects of destructive and constructive interferences on the exceedance probabilities for the total plume are used to explain these differences. One significant result is that all higher-order (third-order and above) moments of the total concentration can be inferred from the application of a clipped-gamma distribution using the information embodied in only the first- and second-order concentration moments of each single plume, and in the cross-correlation coefficient of the instantaneous concentration of the two plumes.