On the coupling between wall-modeled LES and immersed boundary method towards applicative compressible flow simulations

Abstract

The current work presents an innovative numerical technique for high-Reynolds/high-Mach number compressible flow simulations in complex configurations. In particular, the research combines a novel wall-modeled large-eddy simulation technique with a sharp-interface immersed boundary method in the framework of high-order numerical schemes. The proposed approach enables the best from wall modeling and the immersed boundary. The first is concerned with accurately dealing with wall flows while avoiding direct control of near-wall resolution; the second is related to efficiently treating arbitrarily complex geometries in Cartesian grids. In particular, the paper extends a well-established wall model already presented by the research group to arbitrarily-shaped bounds. The method yields a minimally invasive technique that switches between wall-resolved and wall-modeled large-eddy simulations according to the local near-wall resolution. Thus, easily fitting aerodynamic simulation needs. After discussing the numerical procedure, the paper provides several benchmarks to demonstrate the validity of the proposed approach. In particular, literature-available direct numerical datasets are mined to compare acquired outcomes. The results’ accuracy is found to be remarkable from low-Mach-channel and -pipe flow configurations up highly-compressible flows concerning the spatial deployment of the boundary layer over a flat plate and the shock-wave/boundary-layer interaction over a compression ramp. Thus, the proposed method appears to be a promising framework for dealing with engineering-relevant flow simulations along with the efficient path of Cartesian meshes combined with massively parallel GPU-accelerated architectures.