Scaling and modelling of turbulence in variable property channel flows

Journal article (2017)

Authors

Rene Pecnik Energy Technology - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering
A. Patel Energy Technology - Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering
Research Group
Energy Technology (Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering) (TU Delft)
Copyright: © 2017 Rene Pecnik, A. Patel
DOI
help_outline
https://doi.org/10.1017/jfm.2017.348
Turbulence modelling Turbulent boundary layers Compressible boundary layers
More Info
expand_more

Published Date

2017

Language

English

Reuse Rights

Other than for strictly personal use, it is not permitted to download, forward or distribute the text or part of it, without the consent of the author(s) and/or copyright holder(s), unless the work is under an open content license such as Creative Commons.

Faculty

Mechanical, Maritime and Materials Engineering

Department

Process and Energy

Research Group

Energy Technology

Abstract

We derive an alternative formulation of the turbulent kinetic energy equation for flows with strong near-wall density and viscosity gradients. The derivation is based on a scaling transformation of the Navier-Stokes equations using semi-local quantities. A budget analysis of the semi-locally scaled turbulent kinetic energy equation shows that, for several variable property low-Mach-number channel flows, the 'leading-order effect' of variable density and viscosity on turbulence in wall bounded flows can effectively be characterized by the semi-local Reynolds number. Moreover, if a turbulence model is solved in its semi-locally scaled form, we show that an excellent agreement with direct numerical simulations is obtained for both low- and high-Mach-number flows, where conventional modelling approaches fail.

Files

PecnikPatel.pdf
(.pdf | 0.507 Mb)