A compressible turbulence model for the dissipation rate

Abstract

In this work, the ability of a Reynolds stress model to compute turbulent homogeneous shear flow with significant compressibility effects is discussed. Several studies of compressible turbulent flows carried out in the past years have shown that the pressure strain correlation is mainly responsible for the strong changes in the magnitude of the Reynolds stress anisotropies. Two recent compressible models of this term are considered in conjunction with the standard model of the dissipation rate of the turbulent kinetic energy to predict compressible homogeneous flow highly sheared are tested. It is found that deficiencies appear in the calculations even if the pressure strain model is improved by compressibility corrections. Consistent with earlier studies, this deficiency is attributed to the use of the incompressible model for turbulent dissipation. However, a compressibility correction of this equation model uncovers the main focus of the present study. This correction makes the standard coefficients of this equation depend on the turbulent gradient Mach and Mach numbers. The proposed model is tested for low and strong compressibility cases from the DNS results of Sarkar. A comparison of the proposed model predictions with the DNS results shows good qualitative agreement. Therefore, compressibility correction for the incompressible model of the turbulent dissipation rate is found to be an important issue for the compressible homogeneous turbulent shear flow.