Fundamental insight into the physics of buoyant gas dispersion from realistic flow geometries is necessary to accurately predict flow structures associated with hydrogen outflow from accidental leaks and the associated flammability envelope. Using helium as an experimental proxy, turbulent buoyant jets issuing from high-aspect-ratio slots on the side wall of a circular tube were studied experimentally applying simultaneous particle image velocimetry (PIV) and planar laser-induced fluorescence (PLIF) techniques. Two slots with an aspect ratio of 10 were considered in this study. The effects of buoyancy, asymmetry, jet densities and Reynolds numbers on the resulting flow structure were studied in both vertical and horizontal orientations. Significant discrepancies were found between the evolution of current realistic jets issuing from curved surfaces and those conventional high-aspect-ratio jets originating from flat surfaces. These realistic pipeline leak-representative jets were found to deflect along the jet streamwise axis. It was found that increases in aspect ratio caused a reduction in the angle of deflection, jet centreline decay rates and the width growth on both velocity and scalar fields compared to their non-planar round jet counterparts, most notably in the far field.
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