POSITIVITY OF k-EPSILON TURBULENCE MODELS FOR INCOMPRESSIBLE FLOW

Abstract

The k-epsilon turbulence model for incompressible flow involves two advection–diffusion equations plus point-source terms. We propose a new method for positivity analysis. This method uses an iterative procedure combined with an operator splitting. With this method we recover the well-known positivity result for the standard high Reynolds number model. Most importantly, we are able to prove the positivity result for general low Reynolds number k-epsilon models.