Probability distributions of concentration fluctuations of a weakly diffusive passive plume in a turbulent boundary layer

Results are presented from an experimental investigation of turbulent dispersion of a saline plume of large Schmidt number (Sc=830) in a turbulent boundary-layer shear flow simulated in a laboratory water channel. The dispersion measurements are obtained in a neutrally buoyant plume from an elevated point source over a range of downstream distances, where both plume meandering and fine-structure variations in the instantaneous plume are important. High-resolution measurements of the scalar fluctuations in the plume are made with a rake of conductivity probes from which probability distributions of concentration at various points throught the plume are extracted from the time series.Seven candidate probability distributions were tested, namely, the exponential, lognormal, clipped normal, gamma, Weibull, conjugate beta, andK-distributions. Using the measured values of the conditional mean concentration,, and the conditional fluctuation intensity,i_p, the Weibull distribution provided the best match to the skewness and kurtosis over all downstream fetches. The skewness and kurtosis were always overpredicted by the lognormal probability density function (pdf), and underpredicted by the gamma pdf. The conjugate beta distribution for which the model parameters are determined using a method of moments based on the fluctuation intensity,i_p, and skewness,S_p, was capable of modeling the distribution of scalar concentration over a wide range of positions in the plume.