A review of the conditions leading to downwash in physical modeling experiments

Although stack downwash is not a widespread problem at modern fossil-fuel p ower plants and larger industrial stacks, it is a very important problem in simulating buoyant plumes in wind tunnels and towing tanks. Scaling criter ia for avoiding downwash in ten subcritical model experiments have been rev iewed. A comparison was made between data on the occurrence of downwash fro m 10 modeling studies to the theory proposed by Tatom (1986). In general, t here was good agreement of Tatom's theory with the occurrence of downwash. (C) 2001 Elsevier Science Ltd. All rights reserved.