Gray Area Mitigation through Volume Forcing for Hybrid RANS/LES Simulation of Complex Flows

  • Monot, Antoine (Centrale Nantes, CNRS)
  • Friess, Christophe (Aix-Marseille Univ, CNRS)
  • Guilmineau, Emmanuel (Centrale Nantes, CNRS)
  • Visonneau, Michel (Centrale Nantes, CNRS)
  • Wackers, Jeroen (Centrale Nantes / CNRS)

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Hybrid RANS/LES (HRL) turbulence models use a LES behaviour to represent vortices, shear layers, and separated flows, while limiting costs by representing the near-wall behaviour with RANS. However, HRL may have issues in the region where the change from one paradigm to the other occurs, the so-called gray zone, which leads to incorrect velocity profiles and turbulent quantities. In the gray zone, models like Detached-Eddy Simulation (DES) and its subsequent iterations do not transfer modelled turbulence kinetic energy (TKE) from the RANS part to resolved turbulence in the LES part. Instead, the modelled turbulence is artificially destroyed to make place for resolved turbulence. However, in doing so, the physical TKE balance is violated: the total TKE should be conserved. Recently, we have proposed a mechanism for DES-type models, to transfer artificially destroyed modelled TKE to resolved eddies. The approach uses a volume forcing which amplifies already existing velocity fluctuations. The forcing amplitude is derived from the artificial dissipation of modelled TKE which DES-type methods use to transition to the LES mode; this unphysical dissipation is compensated by generating the equivalent amount of resolved kinetic energy. The turbulent scales in which the TKE is injected are extracted from the flow with a variable-coefficient exponential temporal filter. In this paper, the method is evaluated with three test cases. First, a backward-facing step flow shows that the method is effective both for the DES and Delayed DES (DDES) models, providing better agreement of velocity and TKE with experiments than when these models are used without injection. Furthermore, the forcing adapts to, and compensates for, the different behaviour of DES and DDES, so between these models the solutions agree closely. The methodology is then applied to two vortex-dominated real-world flows: a ship, the DTMB 5415 destroyer in 10 deg. sideslip conditions, and a double-delta wing at high angle of attack. These tests investigate if the forcing improves the prediction of such complex, realistic flows. Furthermore, the forcing amplitude will be used as a diagnostic tool, to see if, and where, standard DDES simulations for these cases suffer from unphysical dissipation of modelled turbulence.