DNS of turbulent flow and heat transfer in a channel with surface mounted cubes

DNS of turbulent flow and heat transfer in a channel with surface mounted cubes

Verstappen, R.W.C.P.
van der Velde, R.M.
Veldman, A.E.P.

2000

The turbulent flow and heat transfer in a channel with surface mounted cubical obstacles forms a generic example of a problem that occurs in many engineering applications, for instance in the design of cooling devices. We have performed a numerical simulation of it without using any turbulence models. This approach is the most accurate - but also the most expensive - way of computing complex turbulent flows since all dynamically significant scales of motion are to be solved numerically from the unsteady, incompressible Navier-Stokes equations and the energy equation. In view of the computational complexity, our first concern is to reduce the computational cost as far as we can get. We discretise convective and diffusive operators such that their spectral properties are preserved, i.e. convection ↔ skew-symmetric; diffusion ↔ symmetric, positive definite. Such a symmetry-preserving discretisation is stable on any grid and conserves mass, momentum and kinetic energy if the dissipation is turned off. First, the results of a second-order and a fourth-order, symmetry-preserving discretisation are compared for a fully developed, turbulent flow in a plane channel. The more accurate fourth-order method is applied to perform a numerical simulation of turbulent flow and heat transfer in a channel, where a matrix of cubes is mounted at one wall. Here, the temperature is treated as a passive scalar. The Reynolds number (based on the channel width and the mean bulk velocity) is equal to Re = 13, 000. The results of the numerical simulation agree well with the available experimental data.

Channel flow
Direct numerical simulation
Heat transfer
Higher-order
Symmetry-preserving discretisation
Turbulent flow
Wall-mounted obstacles

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:6c79e1f9-e8d8-4ebe-a451-636b86cc9bba

489070

9788489925700

European Congress on Computational Methods in Applied Sciences and Engineering, ECCOMAS 2000, Barcelona, Spain, 11-14 September 2000

Sponsors: Commission of European Communities (EC); Ministerio de Ciencia y Tecnologia; Generalitat de Catalunya, Comissio Interdepartamental; de Recerca i Innovacio Tecnologica (CIRIT); Autoritat Portuaria de Barcelona

conference paper