Abstract
In order to validate a computational method for solving viscous fluid flows, experiments are carried out in an eccentric cylindrical cavity showing various flow formations over a range of Reynolds numbers. Especially, in numerical solution approaches for isothermal and incompressible flows, we search for simple experimental data for evaluating accuracy as well as performance of the computational method. Verification of different computational methods is arduous, and analytic solutions are only obtained for simple geometries like a channel flow. Clearly, a method is expected to predict different flow patterns within a cavity. Thus, we propose a configuration generating different flow formations depending on the Reynolds number and make the experimental results freely available in order to be used as an assessment criterion to demonstrate the reliability of a new computational approach.
Highlights
The computational study of a physical problem is accepted as reliable, if the employed implementation is validated by using the experimental results
In fluid dynamics simulations, since the computational methods are still being developed, the experimental results with clearly identified initial and boundary conditions are of paramount importance
For systems with lacking the experimental results, direct numerical simulations are used for generating test cases to verify the accuracy of a numerical implementation [19, 20]
Summary
The computational study of a physical problem is accepted as reliable, if the employed implementation is validated by using the experimental results. We propose a simple yet effective geometry generating different flow formations that are challenging for a numerical implementation to simulate reliably. The setup is simple, a cavity flow of a Newtonian fluid, and we compare the computed velocities with the experimental results directly. We propose a simple experimental setup providing different flow formations depending on the Reynolds number. This experimental data are novel for examining a computation implementation since the same configuration generates various flow formations within the laminar regime by just changing the inflow velocity. FEM is still emerging for fluid dynamics, and we propose to use the experimental results for validating new computational approaches. We demonstrate qualitative and quantitative studies and make the experimental results and numerical implementation—CAD model, used mesh, and code in FEniCS to be used under GNU public license [45]—publicly available (see Abali [21]) in order to encourage scientific exchange
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