Turbulent heat transport and its anisotropy in an impinging jet

The turbulent heat transport is anisotropic in many cases as reported by several researchers. RANS-based turbulence models use the turbulent viscosity when expressing the turbulent heat flux in the energy balance (analogy of the Reynolds stresses in the momentum balance). The turbulent (eddy) viscosity calculation comes from the Boussinesq analogy mainly and it represents just a scalar value, hence a possible anisotropy in the turbulent flow field cannot be simply transferred to the temperature field. The computational cost of a LES-based approach can be too prohibitive in complex cases, therefore simpler explicit algebraic heat flux models describing the turbulent heat flux in the time-averaged energy equation could be used to get more accurate CFD results. This paper compares several turbulence models for the case of a turbulent impinging jet and deals with a methodology of implementing a user-defined function describing the anisotropic turbulent heat flux in a CFD code.