Investigation of turbulent boundary layer flow over 2D bump using highly resolved large eddy simulation

A large eddy simulation (LES) study of turbulent non-equilibrium boundary layer flow over 2 D Bump, at comparatively low Reynolds number Reh = U∞h/ν = 1950, was conducted. A well-known LES issue of obtaining and sustaining turbulent flow inside the computational domain at such low Re, is addressed by conducting a precursor calculation of the spatially developing boundary layer flow.

Those results were subsequently used as turbulent inflow database for the main non-equilibrium boundary layer flow computation. The Sagaut (Rech. Aero., pp. 51-63, 1996) sub grid scale (SGS) turbulence model, based on a local estimate of the subgrid scale turbulent kinetic energy ksgs and implicit damping of turbulent SGS viscosity νt(sgs) in the near-wall region, was selected as a suitable basis for the present LES computations due to the fact that block structured MPI parallelized CFD code used in the current computations did not provide a direct possibility for wall-damping of, e.g., the Smagorinsky constant in the near-wall region.

The grid utilized in the main calculation consisted of approximately 9.4 × 106 grid points and the boundary layer flow results obtained, regarding both mean flow profiles and turbulence quantities, showed a good agreement with the available laser Doppler anemometry (LDA) measurements. Analysis of the flow was directly able to identify and confirm the existence of internal layers at positions related to the vicinity of the upstream and downstream discontinuities in the surface curvature and also partially confirm a close interdependency between generation and evolution of internal layers and the abrupt changes in the skin friction, previously reported in the literature. © 2011 American Society of Mechanical Engineers.