Optimized temperature perturbation method to generate turbulent inflow conditions for LES/DNS simulations

Abstract

Abstract The temperature perturbation method (TPM) is used as an alternative technique to the classical velocity perturbations to generate inflow turbulence for LES or DNS simulations. The TPM consists in seeding the flow with random temperature perturbations which, through a buoyancy triggered mechanism, will induce the creation of turbulent structures. Naturally, this implies that the physical buoyancy effects need to be sufficiently strong, which has limited up to now its application to atmospheric flows. The proposed modification makes it applicable to a wider variety of wall-bounded flows, that would involve much smaller length scales than in the atmosphere. In this novel approach, a perturbation zone is defined at the entrance of the domain, along which an artificial local Richardson number is applied so that buoyancy effects are sufficiently strong to create turbulence. The TPM is implemented in the incompressible solver of OpenFOAM v2.3 with buoyancy effects and tested on a plane channel flow at R e τ = 395 . Prior to testing, periodic channel flow results are obtained to represent the reference fully developed turbulent state. The perturbation zone is divided into a fully active zone, where buoyancy is maximum, and a transition zone, needed to insure a smooth progression back to zero buoyancy. Several perturbation functions are applied to modulate these artificial effects, in order to identify the function that most efficiently pre-mixes the flow, thus preventing stratification effects from slowing down the flow recovery. Thereafter, the transition length and the artificial local Richardson number are optimized, based on wall shear stress recovery. Moreover, the effect of the perturbation frequency on not only the flow solution but also the energy spectra is examined in order to prevent the technique from contaminating the energy content. The flow development is compared to the synthetic turbulence generator method of Xie and Castro [1] in terms of the recovery distances of both the wall shear stress and the Reynolds stresses. The optimized method appears to be efficient with a flow that reaches equilibrium and a good quality energy spectra after about 15  δ . Although this final length remains similar to that obtained by competing methods, the optimized TPM benefits from a greater flexibility since only first-order statistics are required as input. Therefore, it can be applied without prior knowledge of second order moments or integral length scales, making it directly applicable to a wide variety of flows.