Investigation on RANS Computation for an Unsteady Turbulent Flow

Abstract

With improvements in a computer hardware and CFD software, the problems treated in industry are becoming more complex, both physically and geometrically. Turbulent flow with strong unsteadiness is one such physically complex example. Since Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is still too time-consuming, a great number of unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) computations have been employed in such engineering applications. However, the applicability of RANS to unsteady flows remains unclear. In the present study, RANS computations for two-dimensional turbulent flow with periodic perturbation over a backward-facing step are performed in order to verify the performance of a low-Reynolds-number type κ-ε turbulence model. Visualization and investigation of the temporal change of the flow pattern and the instantaneous term-by-term budget of the governing equations reveals that the RANS computation can reproduce the unsteady nature satisfactorily, and clarifies why the RANS model captures the unsteady turbulent flow reasonably.

Keywords

• turbulent flow
• computational fluid dynamics
• unsteady flow
• backward-facing step flow
• rans model