Large Eddy Simulation of a Turbulent Flow over Circular and Mixed Staggered Tubes’ Cluster

Abstract

A large eddy simulation study was conducted to investigate the turbulent dynamic structure of a fluid flow in two staggered tube configurations, one is composed of all circular cylinders and the second is composed of circular and square cylinders. The present LES, based on the wall-adapting local eddy viscosity model, has been conducted for ReD = 12,858, which match available experiments. The appropriate grid has been selected using the grid convergence index method so that the wall-normal coordinate value is relevant for walls. Streamlines, turbulence kinetic energy contours, instantaneous vorticity contours computed indicate that wake patterns are more chaotic. In addition, flow coherent eddies within both configurations are identified via the -criterion. Based on the obtained findings, it can be stated that the model considered, in addition to being physically sound, demonstrated to be suitable for simulating the turbulent flow over circular and mixed staggered tube bundles with higher resolution.

Keywords

• tube bundles; large eddy simulation; turbulent flow; wale model; gci method; q-criterion.