Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Heat Transfer at Low Prandtl Numbers in Planar Impinging Jets

•High fidelity simulation of forced convection heat transfer in the case of low Prandtl number fluids•Direct numerical simulation of impinging jet heat transfer•Comparison between a laminar profile and a fully developed turbulent inlet profiles•Comparisons are made between 3 Prandtl numbers•Analysis of the heat transfer around the stagnation point DNS simulations of planar impinging jets are performed to provide reference data to validate RANS models for low-Prandtl turbulent heat transfer. In that configuration, a hot plane jet is blown from a slot at the top wall of a channel and impinges on the cooler bottom wall. The present DNS simulations are carried out at Re=4000 and 5700, based on the jet width and velocity, and for Pr down to 0.01. Two cases are investigated: the case of a laminar uniform jet profile and the case of a fully turbulent inlet profile coming from an auxiliary channel flow simulation running in parallel. The DNS results show how the heat transfer in this configuration evolves from the turbulence-dominated case at Pr=1 to the molecular diffusion-dominate case at Pr=0.01. The temperature field at Pr=0.01 is much smoother than at higher Prandtl number because the much larger heat diffusivity quickly diffuses the temperature fluctuations. The comparison between the laminar and the fully-developed turbulent inflows also show different heat transfer characteristics in the vicinity of the stagnation point, depending on the presence of velocity fluctuations in the bottom-wall boundary layers.