Large-eddy simulation of accelerated turbulent flow in a circular pipe

Abstract

Turbulent pipe flows subject to temporal acceleration have been considered in this study. Large-eddy simulations (LESs) of accelerated turbulent flow in a circular pipe were performed to study the response of the turbulent flow to temporal acceleration. The simulations were started with the fully-developed turbulent pipe flow at an initial Re number, and then a constant temporal acceleration was applied. During the acceleration, the Reynolds number of the pipe flow, based on the pipe diameter and the bulk-mean velocity, increased linearly from ReD=7000 to 36,000. A dimensionless response time for various flow quantities was introduced to measure the delays in the response of the near-wall turbulence to temporal acceleration. The results reveal distinctive features of the delays responsible for turbulence production, energy redistribution, and radial propagation. The conditionally-averaged flow fields associated with Reynolds shear stress producing events were analysed. In the transient flows, sweeps and ejections were closely linked to the delays of turbulence production and of turbulence propagation away from the wall. It is found that strong sweep events were related to the delayed turbulence production in the near-wall region, while ejection events were associated with the propagation of the turbulence away from the wall. The results show that the anisotropy of the turbulence was enhanced during the transient, and this would be a challenging problem to standard turbulence models.