DNS of turbulent channel flow with conjugate heat transfer: Effect of thermal boundary conditions on the second moments and budgets

• DNS of a turbulent channel flow with a Robin boundary condition on the scalar.
• Budgets of second-order moments for conjugate and non-conjugate heat-transfer.
• Original theoretical analysis for compatibility conditions at the wall.

Budgets of turbulent heat fluxes and temperature variance obtained from the Direct Numerical Simulation of an incompressible periodic channel flow with a Reynolds number of 150 (based on friction velocity) and a Prandtl number of 0.71 are presented and analysed for four cases: locally imposed temperature at the wall (constant Dirichlet), locally imposed heat flux (constant Neumann), heat exchange coefficient (Robin) and 3D conjugate heat transfer. The dissipation rate associated with the temperature variance is strongly impacted by the thermal boundary condition. For non-conjugate cases, a straightforward analytical analysis establishes the connection between the boundary condition, the temperature variance and the wall-normal part of the thermal dissipation rate at the wall. For the conjugate case, the two-point correlations of the thermal field in the solid domain confirms the existence of very large scale thermal structures.