Numerical investigation of turbulent lid-driven flow using weakly compressible smoothed particle hydrodynamics CFD code with standard and dynamic LES models

Abstract

Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) is a Lagrangian computational fluid dynamics method that has been widely used in the analysis of physical phenomena characterized by large deformation or multi-phase flow analysis, including free surface. Despite the recent implementation of eddy-viscosity models in SPH methodology, sophisticated turbulent analysis using Lagrangian methodology has been limited due to the lack of computational performance and numerical consistency. In this study, we implement the standard and dynamic Smagorinsky model and dynamic Vreman model as sub-particle scale models based on a weakly compressible SPH solver. The large eddy simulation method is numerically identical to the spatial discretization method of smoothed particle dynamics, enabling the intuitive implementation of the turbulence model. Furthermore, there is no additional filtering process required for physical variables since the sub-grid scale filtering is inherently processed in the kernel interpolation. We simulate lid-driven flow under transition and turbulent conditions as a benchmark. The simulation results show that the dynamic Vreman model produces consistent results with experimental and numerical research regarding Reynolds averaged physical quantities and flow structure. Spectral analysis also confirms that it is possible to analyze turbulent eddies with a smaller length scale using the dynamic Vreman model with the same particle size.