N. Mangiavacchi

Suppression of turbulence in wall-bounded flows by high-frequency spanwise oscillations

The response of wall‐flow turbulence to high‐frequency spanwise oscillations was investigated by direct numerical simulations of a planar channel flow subjected either to an oscillatory spanwise cross‐flow or to the spanwise oscillatory motion of a channel wall. Periods of oscillation, Tosc+=Toscuτ2/ν, ranging from 25 to 500 were studied. For 25≤Tosc+≤200 the turbulent bursting process was suppressed, leading to sustained reductions of 10% to 40% in the turbulent drag and comparable attenuations in all three components of turbulence intensities as well as the turbulent Reynolds shear stress. Oscillations at Tosc+=100 produced the most effective suppression of turbulence. The results were independent of whether the oscillations were generated by a cross‐flow or by the motion of a channel wall. In the latter case, suppression of turbulence was restricted to the oscillating wall while the flow at the other wall remained fully turbulent. Spanwise oscillations may provide a simple and effective method for cont...

A finite difference technique for simulating unsteady viscoelastic free surface flows

This work is concerned with the development of a numerical method capable of simulating viscoelastic free surface flow of an Oldroyd-B fluid. The basic equations governing the flow of an Oldroyd-B fluid are considered. A novel formulation is developed for the computation of the non-Newtonian extra-stress components on rigid boundaries. The full free surface stress conditions are employed. The resulting governing equations are solved by a finite difference method on a staggered grid, influenced by the ideas of the marker-and-cell (MAC) method. Numerical results demonstrating the capabilities of this new technique are presented for a number of problems involving unsteady free surface flows.

Subgrid-scale interactions in a numerically simulated planar turbulent jet and implications for modelling

The dynamics of subgrid-scale energy transfer in turbulence is investigated in a database of a planar turbulent jet at Re λ ≈ 110, obtained by direct numerical simulation. In agreement with analytical predictions (Kraichnan 1976), subgrid-scale energy transfer is found to arise from two effects: one involving non-local interactions between the resolved scales and disparate subgrid scales, the other involving local interactions between the resolved and subgrid scales near the cutoff. The former gives rise to a positive, wavenumber-independent eddy-viscosity distribution in the spectral space, and is manifested as low-intensity, forward transfers of energy in the physical space. The latter gives rise to positive and negative cusps in the spectral eddy-viscosity distribution near the cutoff, and appears as intense and coherent regions of forward and reverse transfer of energy in the physical space. Only a narrow band of subgrid wavenumbers, on the order of a fraction of an octave, make the dominant contributions to the latter. A dynamic two-component subgrid-scale model (DTM), incorporating these effects, is proposed. In this model, the non-local forward transfers of energy are parameterized using an eddy-viscosity term, while the local interactions are modelled using the dynamics of the resolved scales near the cutoff. The model naturally accounts for backscatter and correctly predicts the breakdown of the net transfer into forward and reverse contributions in a priori tests. The inclusion of the local-interactions term in DTM significantly reduces the variability of the model coefficient compared to that in pure eddy-viscosity models. This eliminates the need for averaging the model coefficient, making DTM well-suited to computations of complex-geometry flows. The proposed model is evaluated in LES of transitional and turbulent jet and channel flows. The results show DTM provides more accurate predictions of the statistics, structure, and spectra than dynamic eddy-viscosity models and remains robust at marginal LES resolutions.

Turbulence control in wall-bounded flows by spanwise oscillations

The feasibility of control of wall turbulence by high frequency spanwise oscillations is investigated by direct numerical simulations of a planar turbulent channel flow subjected either to an oscillatory spanwise crossflow or to the spanwise oscillatory motion of one of the channel walls. Periods of oscillation, T+c. = Tos~.u~/u, ranging from 25 to 500 were studied. For 25 < T+c. < 200 production of turbulence is suppressed. The most effective suppression of turbulence occurs at T+~ = 100, for which the overall turbulence production is reduced by 62% compared to the unperturbed channel and sustained turbulent drag reductions of 40% are obtained. The suppression of turbulence is due to a continual shift of the near wall streamwise vortices relative to the wall layer streaks, which in turn leads to a widening, merging and weakening of the wall layer streaks and an overall reduction in the turbulence production. The turbulence suppression mechanism observed in these studies opens up new possibilities for effective control of turbulence in wall-bounded flows.

A Stable Semi-Implicit Method for Free Surface Flows

The present work is concerned with a semi-implicit modification of the GENSMAC method for solving the two-dimensional time-dependent incompressible Navier-Stokes equations in primitive varinbles formulation with a free surface. A projection method is employed to uncouple the velocity components and pressure, thus allowing the solution of each variable separately (a segregated approach). The viscous terms are treated by the implicit backward method in time and a centered second order method in space, and the nonlinear convection terms are explicitly approximated by the high order upwind variable-order nonoscillatory scheme method in space. The boundary conditions at the free surface couple the otherwise segregated velocity and pressure fields. The present work proposes a method that allows the segregated solution of free surface flow problems to be computed by semi-implicit schemes that preserve the stability conditions of the related coupled semi-implicit scheme. The numerical method is applied to both the simulation of free surface and to confined flows. The numerical results demonstrate that the present technique eliminates the parabolic stabiliy restriction required by the original explicit GENSMAC method, and also found in segregated semi-implicit methods with time-lagged boundary conditions. For low Reynolds number flows, the method is robust and very efficient when compared to the original GENSMAC method.

3D ALE Finite-Element Method for Two-Phase Flows With Phase Change

We seek to study numerically two-phase flow phenomena with phase change through the finite-element method (FEM) and the arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian (ALE) framework. This method is based on the so-called “one-fluid” formulation; thus, only one set of equations is used to describe the flow field at the vapor and liquid phases. The equations are discretized on an unstructured tetrahedron mesh and the interface between the phases is defined by a triangular surface, which is a subset of the three-dimensional mesh. The Navier–Stokes equation is used to model the fluid flow with the inclusion of a source term to compute the interfacial forces that arise from two-phase flows. The continuity and energy equations are slightly modified to take into account the heat and mass transport between the different phases. Such a methodology can be employed to study accurately many problems, such as oil extraction and refinement in the petroleum area, design of refrigeration systems, modeling of biological systems, and efficient cooling of electronics for computational purposes, which is the aim of this research. A comparison of the obtained numerical results to the classical literature is performed and presented in this paper, thus proving the capability of the proposed new methodology as a platform for the study of diabatic two-phase flows.

A 3D moving mesh Finite Element Method for two-phase flows

A 3D ALE Finite Element Method is developed to study two-phase flow phenomena using a new discretization method to compute the surface tension forces. The computational method is based on the Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian formulation (ALE) and the Finite Element Method (FEM), creating a two-phase method with an improved model for the liquid-gas interface. An adaptive mesh update procedure is also proposed for effective management of the mesh to remove, add and repair elements, since the computational mesh nodes move according to the flow. The ALE description explicitly defines the two-phase interface position by a set of interconnected nodes which ensures a sharp representation of the boundary, including the role of the surface tension. The proposed methodology for computing the curvature leads to accurate results with moderate programming effort and computational cost. Static and dynamic tests have been carried out to validate the method and the results have compared well to analytical solutions and experimental results found in the literature, demonstrating that the new proposed methodology provides good accuracy to describe the interfacial forces and bubble dynamics. This paper focuses on the description of the proposed methodology, with particular emphasis on the discretization of the surface tension force, the new remeshing technique, and the validation results. Additionally, a microchannel simulation in complex geometry is presented for two elongated bubbles

Surface tension implementation for Gensmac 2D

In the present work we describe a method which allows the incorporation of surface tension into the GENSMAC2D code. This is achieved on two scales. First on the scale of a cell, the surface tension effects are incorporated into the free surface boundary conditions through the computation of the capillary pressure. The required curvature is estimated by fitting a least square circle to the free surface using the tracking particles in the cell and in its close neighbors. On a sub-cell scale, short wavelength perturbations are filtered out using a local 4-point stencil which is mass conservative. An efficient implementation is obtained through a dual representation of the cell data, using both a matrix representation, for ease at identifying neighbouring cells, and also a tree data structure, which permits the representation of specific groups of cells with additional information pertaining to that group. The resulting code is shown to be robust, and to produce accurate results when compared with exact solutions of selected fluid dynamic problems involving surface tension.

Rotating Disk Flow in Electrochemical Cells: A Coupled Solution for Hydrodynamic and Mass Equations

This work deals with the steady-state solution of a rotating disk flow, coupled, through the fluid viscosity, to the mass-concentration field of chemical species. The configuration refers to electrochemical cells where the working electrode consists of an iron rotating rod which is dissolved into the electrolyte, a 1 M sulfuric acid solution. Dissolution of the electrode gives rise to a thin concentration boundary layer, which, together with the potential applied to the electrode, results in an increase in the fluid viscosity and a decrease in the diffusion coefficient close to the electrode surface, both affecting the current. A phenomenological law is assumed, relating the fluid viscosity to the concentration of relevant chemical species. Parameters appearing in this law are evaluated based on experimental electrochemical data. The steady-state solution is obtained by solving the coupled hydrodynamic and mass-concentration equations.

Rotating disk flow stability in electrochemical cells: Effect of viscosity stratification

This work is about the effect of viscosity stratification on the hydrodynamic instability of rotating disk flow, and whether or not it can take into account experimental observations of the lowering of critical Reynolds numbers in electrochemical systems, where a viscosity stratification is assumed to result from the gradients of chemical species existing in the convective boundary layer near the disk electrode. The analysis is for temporal stability of a class of von Karman solutions: fully three-dimensional modes are considered and the neutral curves are therefore functions of not only the Reynolds number but also the wave frequency and the two wave numbers. Global minimization over wave numbers and also over the frequency gives the critical Reynolds number. The neutral curves exhibit a two-mode structure and the dependence of both modes on parameters is studied. It is shown that viscosity stratification leads to an increase in the range of parameters where perturbations are amplified and to a reduction...