Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics Simulations of Water Flow in a 90° Pipe Bend

Abstract

The flow through pipe bends and elbows occurs in a wide range of applications. While many experimental data are available for such flows in the literature, their numerical simulation is less abundant. Here, we present highly-resolved simulations of laminar and turbulent water flow in a 90° pipe bend using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) methods coupled to a Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) model for turbulence. Direct comparison with available experimental data is provided in terms of streamwise velocity profiles, turbulence intensity profiles and cross-sectional velocity maps at different stations upstream, inside and downstream of the pipe bend. The numerical results are in good agreement with the experimental data. In particular, maximum root-mean-square deviations from the experimental velocity profiles are always less than ∼1.4%. Convergence to the experimental measurements of the turbulent fluctuations is achieved by quadrupling the resolution necessary to guarantee convergence of the velocity profiles. At such resolution, the deviations from the experimental data are ∼0.8%. In addition, the cross-sectional velocity maps inside and downstream of the bend shows that the experimentally observed details of the secondary flow are also very well predicted by the numerical simulations.

Keywords

• curved pipes
• secondary flow
• turbulent pipe flow
• large-eddy simulation
• particle methods
• numerical simulation