High Reynolds flows and their analysis

Participants: Charles-Henri Bruneau, Angelo Iollo, Iraj Mortazavi, Michel Bergmann, Lisl Weynans.

It is very exciting to model complex phenomena for high Reynolds flows and to develop methods to compute the corresponding approximate solutions, however a well-understanding of the phenomena is necessary. Classical graphic tools give us the possibility to visualize some aspects of the solution at a given time and to even see in some way their evolution. Nevertheless in many situations it is not sufficient to understand the mechanisms that create such a behavior or to find the real properties of the flow. It is then necessary to carefully analyze the flow, for instance the vortex dynamics or to identify the coherent structures to better understand their impact on the whole flow behavior. The various numerical methods used or developed to approximate the flows depend on the studied phenomenon. Our goal is to compute the most reliable method for each situation.

The first method, which is affordable in 2D, consists in a directly solving of the genuine Navier-Stokes equations in primitive variables (velocity-pressure) on Cartesian domains. The bodies, around which the flow has to be computed are modeled using the penalization method (also named Brinkman-Navier-Stokes equations). This is an immersed boundary method in which the bodies are considered as porous media with a very small intrinsic permeability. This method is very easy to handle as it consists only in adding a mass term U=K in the momentum equations. The boundary conditions imposed on artificial boundaries of the computational domains avoid any reflections when vortices cross the boundary. To make the approximation efficient enough in terms of CPU time, a multi-grid solver with a cell by cell Gauss-Seidel smoother is used.

The second type of methods is the vortex method. It is a Lagrangian technique that has been proposed as an alternative to more conventional grid-based methods. Its main feature is that the inertial nonlinear term in the flow equations is implicitly accounted for by the transport of particles. The method thus avoids to a large extent the classical stability/accuracy dilemma of finite-difference or finite-volume methods. This has been demonstrated in the context of computations for high Reynolds number laminar flows and for turbulent flows at moderate Reynolds numbers. This method has recently enabled us to obtain new results concerning the three-dimensional dynamics of cylinder wakes.

The third method is to develop reduced order models (ROM) based on a Proper Orthogonal Decomposition (POD). The POD consists in approximating a given flow field U(x; t) with a decomposition where the basis functions are empirical in the sense that they derive from an existing data base given for instance by one of the methods above. Then the approximation of Navier-Stokes equations for instance is reduced to solving a low-order dynamical system that is very cheap in terms of CPU time. Nevertheless the ROM can only restitute what is contained in the basis. Our challenge is to extend its application in order to make it an actual prediction tool.

The fourth method is a finite volume method on cartesian grids to simulate compressible Euler or Navier-Stokes Flows in complex domains. An immersed boundary-like technique is developed to take into account boundary conditions around the obstacles with order two accuracy.

Exemples: Turbulence simulations |  POD simulations | Aeronautic simulations |  Bio-locomotion simulations |  Stability analysis | Compressible flows