Effect of local grid refinement on performance of scale-resolving models for simulation of complex external flows

Abstract

Numerical simulations are crucial for fast and accurate estimations of the flow characteristics in many engineering applications such as atmospheric boundary layers around buildings, external aerodynamics around vehicles, and pollutant dispersion. In the simulation of flow over urban-like obstacles, it is crucial to accurately resolve the flow characteristics with reasonable computational cost. Therefore, Large Eddy Simulations on non-uniform grids are usually employed. However, an undesirable accumulation of energy at grid-refinement interfaces was observed in previous studies using non-uniform grids. This phenomenon induced oscillations in the spanwise velocity component, mainly on fine-to-coarse grid interfaces. In this study, the two challenging test cases of flow over urban-like cubes and flow over a 3-D circular cylinder were simulated using three different scale-resolving turbulence models. Simulations were performed on uniform coarse and fine grids on one hand, and a non-uniform grid on the other, to assess the effect of mesh density and mesh interfaces on the models’ performance. Overall, the proposed One-Equation Scale-Adaptive Simulation (One-Equation SAS) showed the least deviation from the experimental results in both tested cases and on all grid sizes and types when compared to the Shear Stress Transport-Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (IDDES) and the Algebraic Wall-Modeled Large Eddy Simulation (WMLES).