An application of the scale-adapted simulation to the unsteady flow across a tube bundle

Abstract

In the last decades, one of the main objectives pursued in the field of computational fluid dynamics has been the development of turbulent flow models and simulations techniques capable of generating predictions of flow patterns accurate enough to many industrial applications in a reasonable wall-clock time and at an acceptable cost. Very often, a trade-off has to be sought between the engineer’s expectations regarding the accuracy of the model and the limited computational resources available. In that framework, the present contribution aims at demonstrating the capabilities of the SST-SAS approach which is considered as an intermediate model with respect to accuracy and computational requirements. To that end, the turbulent flow through a tube bundle was selected as test case. Preliminary sensitivity analyses were carried out to properly choose the residuals tolerance level, duration of the physical time integration, mesh size and time step value. The SST-SAS results are compared with available experimental data as well as with different simulations results taken from the literature. A quantitative scoring criterion was defined to sort out the different models results: the SST-SAS was at the top, sharing the first place with a URANS-RSM approach.