The effect of inflow conditions on the development of non-swirling versus swirling impinging turbulent jets

•The effect of inflow conditions on turbulent swirling impinging jets is studied.•CFD models are validated against experimental data sets from the literature.•The accuracy of different turbulence models is tested.•For the same Re, non-swirling impinging jets follow their free jet counterparts.•With swirl, wall shear stress and turbulent kinetic energy are affected. In this paper, axisymmetric turbulent jets are investigated numerically with the aim of improving our understanding of the effect of inflow conditions, swirl and near-field impingement on jet development. After presenting an extensive overview of the works published on swirling and non-swirling impinging jets, the Reynolds-Averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) approach (with different turbulence models) is used to study these flows and validated against experimental data sets. This study then explores the effects of the inlet swirl velocity profiles, namely a Uniform Profile (UP), Solid Body rotation (SB) and Parabolic Profile (PP) on impinging jet development in weakly swirling jets (S⩽0.3) where no vortex breakdown occurs at Re=23,000 in the near-field (x/D