Alfredo Pinelli

The autonomous cycle of near-wall turbulence

Numerical experiments on modified turbulent channels at moderate Reynolds numbers are used to differentiate between several possible regeneration cycles for the turbulent fluctuations in wall-bounded flows. It is shown that a cycle exists which is local to the near-wall region and does not depend on the outer flow. It involves the formation of velocity streaks from the advection of the mean profile by streamwise vortices, and the generation of the vortices from the instability of the streaks. Interrupting any of those processes leads to laminarization. The presence of the wall seems to be only necessary to maintain the mean shear. The generation of secondary vorticity at the wall is shown to be of little importance in turbulence generation under natural circumstances. Inhibiting its production increases turbulence intensity and drag.

Immersed-boundary methods for general finite-difference and finite-volume Navier-Stokes solvers

We present an immersed-boundary algorithm for incompressible flows with complex boundaries, suitable for Cartesian or curvilinear grid system. The key stages of any immersed-boundary technique are the interpolation of a velocity field given on a mesh onto a general boundary (a line in 2D, a surface in 3D), and the spreading of a force field from the immersed boundary to the neighboring mesh points, to enforce the desired boundary conditions on the immersed-boundary points. We propose a technique that uses the Reproducing Kernel Particle Method [W.K. Liu, S. Jun, Y.F. Zhang, Reproducing kernel particle methods, Int. J. Numer. Methods Fluids 20(8) (1995) 1081-1106] for the interpolation and spreading. Unlike other methods presented in the literature, the one proposed here has the property that the integrals of the force field and of its moment on the grid are conserved, independent of the grid topology (uniform or non-uniform, Cartesian or curvilinear). The technique is easy to implement, and is able to maintain the order of the original underlying spatial discretization. Applications to two- and three-dimensional flows in Cartesian and non-Cartesian grid system, with uniform and non-uniform meshes are presented.

Turbulent shear flow over active and passive porous surfaces

The behaviour of turbulent shear flow over a mass-neutral permeable wall is studied numerically. The transpiration is assumed to be proportional to the local pressure fluctuations. It is first shown that the friction coefficient increases by up to 40% over passively porous walls, even for relatively small porosities. This is associated with the presence of large spanwise rollers, originating from a linear instability which is related both to the Kelvin–Helmholtz instability of shear layers, and to the neutral inviscid shear waves of the mean turbulent profile. It is shown that the rollers can be forced by patterned active transpiration through the wall, also leading to a large increase in friction when the phase velocity of the forcing resonates with the linear eigenfunctions mentioned above. Phase-lock averaging of the forced solutions is used to further clarify the flow mechanism. This study is motivated by the control of separation in boundary layers.

Marginally turbulent flow in a square duct.

A direct numerical simulation of turbulent flow in a straight square duct was performed in order to determine the minimal requirements for self-sustaining turbulence. It was found that turbulence can be maintained for values of the bulk Reynolds number above approximately 1100, corresponding to a friction-velocity-based Reynolds number of 80. The minimum value for the streamwise period of the computational domain is around 190 wall units, roughly independently of the Reynolds number. We present a characterization of the flow state at marginal Reynolds numbers which substantially differs from the fully turbulent one: the marginal state exhibits a four-vortex secondary flow structure alternating in time whereas the fully turbulent one presents the usual eight-vortex pattern. It is shown that in the regime of marginal Reynolds numbers buffer-layer coherent structures play a crucial role in the appearance of secondary flow of Prandtls second kind.

Flow over a Wing with Leading-Edge Undulations

The stall-delaying properties of the humpback whale flipper have been observed and quantified in recent years, through both experimental and numerical studies. In the present work, numerical simulations of an infinite-span wing with an idealized representation of this geometry are reported at a Reynolds number of 1.2×10(to the power of 5). Using large-eddy simulation, an adequate spatial resolution is first established before also examining the spanwise extent of the domain. These results are then analyzed to provide an explanation of the conditions that drive the lift observed beyond the conventional stall angle. The undulating leading-edge geometry gives rise to a spanwise pressure gradient that drives a secondary flow toward the regions of minimum chord. In turn, this leads to the entrainment of higher-momentum fluid into the region behind the maximum chord, which energizes the boundary layer and delays stall. Aside from demonstrating a significant poststall lift, the undulations also have the added benefit of substantially reducing lift fluctuations.

Linear instability of a corrugated vortex sheet - a model for streak instability

The linear inviscid instability of an infinitely thin vortex sheet, periodically corrugated with finite amplitude along the spanwise direction, is investigated analytically. Two types of corrugations are studied, one of which includes the presence of an impermeable wall. Exact eigensolutions are found in the limits of very long and of very short wavelengths. The intermediate-wavenumber range is explored by means of a second-order asymptotic series and by limited numerical integration. The sheets are unstable to both sinuous and varicose disturbances. The former are generally found to be more unstable, although the difference only appears for finite wavelengths. The effect of the corrugation is shown to be stabilizing, although in the wall-bounded sheet the effect is partly compensated by the increase in the distance from the wall. The controlling parameter in that case appears to be the minimum separation from the sheet valley to the wall. The instability is traced to a pair of oblique Kelvin–Helmholtz waves in the flat-sheet limit, but the eigenfunctions change character both as the corrugation is made sharper and as the wall is approached, becoming localized near the crests and valleys of the corrugation. The study is motivated by the desire to understand the behaviour of lifted low-speed streaks in wall-bounded flows, and it is shown that the spatial structure of the fundamental sinuous eigenmode is remarkably similar to previously known three-dimensional nonlinear equilibrium solutions in both plane Couette and Poiseuille flows.

Accelerating fluid–solid simulations (Lattice-Boltzmann & Immersed-Boundary) on heterogeneous architectures

We propose a numerical approach based on the Lattice-Boltzmann (LBM) and Immersed Boundary (IB) methods to tackle the problem of the interaction of solids with an incompressible fluid flow, and its implementation on heterogeneous platforms based on data-parallel accelerators such as NVIDIA GPUs and the Intel Xeon Phi. We explain in detail the parallelization of these methods and describe a number of optimizations, mainly focusing on improving memory management and reducing the cost of host-accelerator communication. As previous research has consistently shown, pure LBM simulations are able to achieve good performance results on heterogeneous systems thanks to the high parallel efficiency of this method. Unfortunately, when coupling LBM and IB methods, the overheads of IB degrade the overall performance. As an alternative, we have explored different hybrid implementations that effectively hide such overheads and allow us to exploit both the multi-core and the hardware accelerator in a cooperative way, with excellent performance results.

Fast finite difference Poisson solvers on heterogeneous architectures

In this paper we propose and evaluate a set of new strategies for the solution of three dimensional separable elliptic problems on CPU–GPU platforms. The numerical solution of the system of linear equations arising when discretizing those operators often represents the most time consuming part of larger simulation codes tackling a variety of physical situations. Incompressible fluid flows, electromagnetic problems, heat transfer and solid mechanic simulations are just a few examples of application areas that require efficient solution strategies for this class of problems. GPU computing has emerged as an attractive alternative to conventional CPUs for many scientific applications. High speedups over CPU implementations have been reported and this trend is expected to continue in the future with improved programming support and tighter CPU–GPU integration. These speedups by no means imply that CPU performance is no longer critical. The conventional CPU-control–GPU-compute pattern used in many applications wastes much of CPU’s computational power. Our proposed parallel implementation of a classical cyclic reduction algorithm to tackle the large linear systems arising from the discretized form of the elliptic problem at hand, schedules computing on both the GPU and the CPUs in a cooperative way. The experimental result demonstrates the effectiveness of this approach.

Traveling-waves consistent with turbulence-driven secondary flow in a square duct

We present numerically determined traveling-wave solutions for pressure-driven flow through a straight duct with a square cross section. This family of solutions represents typical coherent structures (a staggered array of counter-rotating streamwise vortices and an associated low-speed streak) on each wall. Their streamwise average flow in the cross-sectional plane corresponds to an eight-vortex pattern much alike the secondary flow found in the turbulent regime.

Accelerating Solid-fluid Interaction using Lattice-boltzmann and Immersed Boundary Coupled Simulations on Heterogeneous Platforms

We propose a numerical approach based on the Lattice-Boltzmann (LBM) and Immersed Boundary (IB) methods to tackle the problem of the interaction of solids with an incompressible fluid flow. The proposed method uses a Cartesian uniform grid that incorporates both the fluid and the solid domain. This is a very optimum and novel method to solve this problem and is a growing research topic in Computational Fluid Dynamics. We explain in detail the parallelization of the whole method on both GPUs and an heterogeneous GPU-Multicore platform and describe different optimizations, focusing on memory management and CPU-GPU communication. Our performance evaluation consists of a series of numerical experiments that simulate situations of industrial and research interest. Based on these tests, we have shown that the baseline LBM implementation achieves satisfactory results on GPUs. Unfortunately, when coupling LBM and IB methods on GPUs, the overheads of IB degrade the overall performance. As an alternative we have explored an heterogeneous implementation that is able to hide such overheads and allows us to exploit both Multicore and GPU resources in a cooperative way.