GRAVITY CURRENTS IN LINEARLY STRATIFIED AMBIENT FLUID

 The present work aims to study the behavior of a dense fluid current in a rectangular (or in a circular) cross-section channel. The denser fluid propagates into a less dense ambient fluid, with linear stratification of density in the vertical  A simplified model was used to compute the front speed of the gravity current. The theoretical speed was obtained by: a) imposing the continuity between the injected and the propagating fluid; b) by considering the jump condition and the energetic balance at the head of the current.  Seventy-six experiments were performed. The results show a systematic overestimation of the experimental front speed. The discrepancy decreases significantly for increasing value of the parameter S (representative of the relation between the density stratification of the ambient fluid and the density of the intruding current) and is at a minimum for S 1 (i.e., density of the intruding current equal to the bottom density of the ambient fluid).