No-slip Wall Boundary Conditions Research Articles

A high order moving boundary treatment for convection-diffusion equations

In this paper, a new type of inverse Lax-Wendroff boundary treatment is designed for high order finite difference schemes for solving general convection-diffusion equations on time-varying domain. This new method can achieve high order accuracy on Dirichlet boundary conditions with moving boundary. To ensure stability of the boundary treatment, we give a convex combination of the boundary treatments for the diffusion-dominated and the convection-dominated cases. A group convex combination of weights is carefully designed to avoid zero denominator, resulting in a unified algorithm for pure convection, convection-dominated, convection-diffusion, diffusion-dominated and pure diffusion cases. In order to match the time levels when constructing values of ghost points in the two intermediate stages of the third order Runge-Kutta method, we propose a new approximation to the mixed derivatives at the boundaries to ensure high order accuracy and to improve computational efficiency. In particular, we extend the boundary treatment to the compressible Navier-Stokes equations, which satisfies the isothermal no-slip wall boundary condition at any Reynolds number. We provide numerical tests for one- and two-dimensional problems involving both scalar equations and systems, demonstrating that our boundary treatment is high order accurate for problems with smooth solutions and also performs well for problems involving interactions between viscous shocks and moving rigid bodies.

Entropy stability for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with strong imposition of the no-slip boundary condition

We consider the compressible Navier-Stokes equations subject to no-slip adiabatic wall boundary conditions. The main goal is to investigate stability properties of schemes imposing the no-slip condition strongly (injection) and the temperature condition weakly by a simultaneous approximation term. To this end, we propose a low-order summation-by-parts scheme. By verifying the complete linearisation procedure, we prove linear stability for the scheme. In addition, and assuming that the interior scheme is entropy stable, we also prove entropy stability for the full scheme including the boundary treatment. Furthermore, we propose a linearly stable 3rd-order scheme with the same imposition of the wall conditions. However, the 3rd-order scheme is not provably non-linearly stable. A number of simulations show that the boundary procedure is robust for both schemes.

Numerical Analysis of Effects of Specularity Coefficient and Restitution Coefficient on the Hydrodynamics of Particles in a Rotating Drum

Various simulations have been conducted to understand the macroscopic behavior of particles in the solid-gas flow in rotating drums in the past. In these studies, the no-slip wall boundary condition and fixed restitution coefficient between particles were usually adopted. The paper presents a numerical study of the gas-solid flow in a rotating drum to understand the effect of the specularity coefficient and restitution coefficient on the hydrodynamic behavior of particles in the segregation process. The volume fraction, granular pressure, granular temperature and their relationships are examined in detail. The boundary conditions of the no-slip and specularity coefficient of 1 are compared. In the simulations, two different sizes of particles with the same density are considered and the Eulerian–Eulerian multiphase model and the kinetic theory of granular flow (KTGF) are used. The results reveal that the hydrodynamical behavior of the particles in the rotating drum is affected by the boundary condition and restitution coefficient. In particular, the increase of specularity coefficient can increase the active region depth, angle repose, granular pressure for both small and large particles and granular temperature for large particles. With increasing restitution coefficient, the angle of repose decreases and granular pressure and temperature increase at the same volume fraction for both small and large particles.

Eigensolution analysis of immersed boundary method based on volume penalization: Applications to high-order schemes

This paper presents eigensolution and non-modal analyses for immersed boundary methods (IBMs) based on volume penalization for the linear advection equation. This approach is used to analyze the behavior of flux reconstruction (FR) discretization, including the influence of polynomial order and penalization parameter on numerical errors and stability. Through a semi-discrete analysis, we find that the inclusion of IBM adds additional dissipation without changing significantly the dispersion of the original numerical discretization. This agrees with the physical intuition that in this type of approach, the solid wall is modelled as a porous medium with vanishing viscosity. From a stability point of view, the variation of penalty parameter can be analyzed based on a fully-discrete analysis, which leads to practical guidelines on the selection of penalization parameter. Numerical experiments indicate that the penalization term needs to be increased to damp oscillations inside the solid (i.e. porous region), which leads to undesirable time step restrictions. As an alternative, we propose to include a second-order term in the solid for the no-slip wall boundary condition. Results show that by adding a second-order term we improve the overall accuracy with relaxed time step restriction. This indicates that the optimal value of the penalization parameter and the second-order damping can be carefully chosen to obtain a more accurate scheme. Finally, the approximated relationship between these two parameters is obtained and used as a guideline to select the optimum penalty terms in a Navier-Stokes solver, to simulate flow past a cylinder.

Development and analysis of entropy stable no-slip wall boundary conditions for the Eulerian model for viscous and heat conducting compressible flows

Nonlinear entropy stability analysis is used to derive entropy stable no-slip wall boundary conditions for the Eulerian model proposed by Svärd (Phys A Stat Mech Appl 506:350–375, 2018). The spatial discretization is based on entropy stable collocated discontinuous Galerkin operators with the summation-by-parts property for unstructured grids. A set of viscous test cases of increasing complexity are simulated using both the Eulerian and the classic compressible Navier–Stokes models. The numerical results obtained with the two models are compared, and similarities and differences are then highlighted. However, the differences are very small and probably smaller than what the current experimental technology allows to measure.

Entropy stable modal discontinuous Galerkin schemes and wall boundary conditions for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations

Entropy stable schemes ensure that physically meaningful numerical solutions also satisfy a semi-discrete entropy inequality under appropriate boundary conditions. In this work, we describe a discretization of viscous terms in the compressible Navier-Stokes equations which enables a simple and explicit imposition of entropy stable no-slip and reflective (symmetry) wall boundary conditions for discontinuous Galerkin (DG) discretizations. Specifically, we derive methods for imposing adiabatic no-slip and reflective (symmetry) boundary conditions for modal entropy stable DG formulations which preserve a semi-discrete entropy inequality. Numerical results confirm the robustness and accuracy of the proposed approaches.

Optimization of 4D flow MRI velocity field in the aorta with divergence-free smoothing.

Divergence-free smoothing with wall treatment (DFSwt) method is proposed for processing with four-dimensional (4D) flow magnetic resonance imaging (MRI) data of blood flows to enhance the quality of flow field with physical constraints. The new method satisfies the no-slip wall boundary condition and applies wall function of velocity profile for better estimating the velocity gradient in the near-wall region, and consequently improved wall shear stress (WSS) calculation against the issue of coarse resolution of 4D flow MRI. In the first testing case, blood flow field obtained from 4D flow MRI is well smoothed by DFSwt method. A great consistency is observed between the post-processed 4D flow MRI data and the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) data in the interested velocity field. WSS has an apparent improvement due to the proposed near-wall treatment with special wall function comparing to the result from original 4D flow MRI data or the DFS-processed data with no wall function. The other five cases also show the same performance that smoothed velocity field and improved WSS estimation are achieved on 4D flow MRI data optimized by DFSwt. The improvements will benefit the study of hemodynamics regarding the determination of location or the potential possibility of lesions.

Kernel aggregated fast multipole method

Many different simulation methods for Stokes flow problems involve a common computationally intense task -- the summation of a kernel function over $O(N^2)$ pairs of points. One popular technique is the Kernel Independent Fast Multipole Method (KIFMM), which constructs a spatial adaptive octree for all points and places a small number of equivalent multipole and local equivalent points around each octree box, and completes the kernel sum with $O(N)$ cost, using these equivalent points. Simpler kernels can be used between these equivalent points to improve the efficiency of KIFMM. Here we present further extensions and applications to this idea, to enable efficient summations and flexible boundary conditions for various kernels. We call our method the Kernel Aggregated Fast Multipole Method (KAFMM), because it uses different kernel functions at different stages of octree traversal. We have implemented our method as an open-source software library STKFMM based on the high performance library PVFMM, with support for Laplace kernels, the Stokeslet, regularized Stokeslet, Rotne-Prager-Yamakawa (RPY) tensor, and the Stokes double-layer and traction operators. Open and periodic boundary conditions are supported for all kernels, and the no-slip wall boundary condition is supported for the Stokeslet and RPY tensor. The package is designed to be ready-to-use as well as being readily extensible to additional kernels.

Redesign of Axial Fan Using Viscous Inverse Design Method Based on Boundary Vorticity Flux Diagnosis

Abstract The inverse design method for turbomachinery can directly acquire a blade geometry with specific aerodynamic parameters, such as pressure loading on the blade surfaces. The difference between the inverse design and direct analysis design is that the management of the flow field is controlled by aerodynamic parameters instead of geometric parameters. Although the inverse design has been studied since the 1940s, it is far from being mature enough in comparison with the analysis method. In this work, the inverse problem method is improved by two aspects: the calculation accuracy and the strategy to determine the pressure loading distribution. The application of a high-quality mesh auto-generation and deformation technique to the inverse design is introduced. The no-slip wall boundary conditions, similar to the analysis model, and high-quality mesh, enable the use of an advanced turbulence model in the inverse design. These methods improve the accuracy of the inverse design. The loading distribution in the inverse design is obtained based on the boundary vorticity flux diagnosis. An axial fan is redesigned as an example of the inverse design method. The internal flow loss analysis based on the entropy production theory verifies the effectiveness of the inverse design used in this study.

Side wall boundary effect on the Rayleigh–Taylor instability

Rayleigh–Taylor instability (RTI) is a common phenomenon in daily life and in industrial application. Despite the long history of investigating the RTI with periodic boundary condition, there are only few studies for the RTI with no-slip side wall boundary condition. In fact, the RTI with the side wall boundary condition is more realistic physics. In this work, we investigate the side wall boundary effect on the RTI using a phase-field model. No-slip conditions are employed on all boundaries. The governing equations are the coupled Navier–Stokes (NS) and Cahn–Hilliard (CH) system. We temporally solve the NS equation using Chorin’s projection method and the CH equation using Eyre’s nonlinear splitting scheme. A multigrid method is employed to solve the discrete system of CH equation. By various numerical experiments, we find that the side wall will delays the evolution of bubble and spike, causes a longer interface length and complex interface shape. Besides that, some other parameters, such as Reynolds number and aspect ratio of domain etc., can also cause significantly different phase evolutions.

A semi-implicit immersed boundary method for simulating viscous flow-induced sound with moving boundaries

In this paper, a semi-implicit immersed boundary body force model is derived from the compressible Navier–Stokes equations, to directly predict the viscous flow-induced sound from moving objects on a fixed Cartesian grid. To overcome the conflict of grid quality with efficiency in simulating moving-boundary problems with high-order computational aeroacoustics methods, a prediction–correction technique is utilized. This accurately satisfies no-slip wall boundary conditions at every time step without any feedback treatment. A particular contribution of the work is the introduction of a numerical model equation to analyze the body force convergence. This is useful to pre-evaluate the generated Cartesian and body-surface grids. Several benchmark aeroacoustic problems are simulated to validate the present model. Results show that the unsteady force and far-field sound directivity agree well with the previous direct numerical simulation results. The work further suggests that the developed body force model/CAA methods are capable of predicting interaction noise, especially those associated with oscillating multiple objects.

Solid wall and open boundary conditions in hybrid recursive regularized lattice Boltzmann method for compressible flows

Complex geometries and open boundaries have been intensively studied in the nearly incompressible lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) framework. Therefore, only few boundary conditions for the high speed fully compressible LBM have been proposed. This paper deals with the definition of efficient boundary conditions for the compressible LBM methods, with the emphasis put on the newly proposed hybrid recursive regularized D3Q19 LBM (HRR-LBM) with applications to compressible aerodynamics. The straightforward simple extrapolation-based far-field boundary conditions, the characteristic boundary conditions, and the absorbing sponge layer approach are extended and estimated in the HRR-LBM for the choice of open boundaries. Moreover, a cut-cell type approach to handle the immersed solid is proposed to model both slip and no-slip wall boundary conditions with either isothermal or adiabatic behavior. The proposed implementations are assessed considering the simulation of (i) isentropic vortex convection with subsonic to supersonic inflow and outflow conditions, (ii) two-dimensional (2D) compressible mixing layer, (iii) steady inviscid transonic flow over a National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NACA) 0012 airfoil, (iv) unsteady viscous transonic flow over a NACA 0012 airfoil, and (v) three-dimensional (3D) transonic flows over a German Aerospace Center (DLR) F6 full aircraft configuration.

Improved treatment of wall boundary conditions for a particle method with consistent spatial discretization

In recent years, consistent spatial discretization schemes for meshfree particle methods to numerically simulate incompressible flow have been studied by many researchers. This study is focused on the treatment of solid wall boundary conditions for one of those schemes, namely the least squares MPS (LSMPS) scheme, and proposes a new technique to deal with no-slip and free-slip wall boundary conditions. With the proposed treatment, wall geometries are expressed by surface meshes, i.e. polygons in 3D and line segments in 2D. Thus, complicated geometries can be handled easily. Based on a Taylor series expansion, wall boundary conditions are incorporated into the differential operators acting on fluid particles located in the vicinity of a wall, through a least squares approach. As a consequence, Neumann boundary conditions can be treated quite efficiently. To verify consistency of the proposed discretization scheme, a convergence study was carried out. As numerical examples, Couette flow, plane Poiseuille flow, gravity-driven flow in a 3D square duct, a rigid rotation problem, Taylor–Green vortices and lid-driven cavity flow have been calculated using the proposed boundary treatment, with both no-slip and free-slip conditions applied. As a result, the present method agreed well with the reference solutions, which verified its computational accuracy.

Numerical study of crude oil batch mixing in a long channel

The main objective of this work is to predict the mixing of two different miscible oils in a very long channel. The background to this problem relates to the mixing of heavy and light oil in a pipeline. As a first step, a 2D channel with an aspect ratio of 250 is considered. The batch-mixing of two miscible crude oils with different viscosities and densities is modeled using an unsteady laminar model and unsteady RANS model available in the commercial CFD solver ANSYS-Fluent. For a comparison, a LES model was used for a 3D version of the 2D channel. The distinguishing feature of this work is the Lagrangian coordinate system utilized to set no-slip wall boundary conditions. The global CFD model has been validated against classical analytical solutions. Excellent agreement has been achieved. Simulations were carried out for a Reynolds number of 6300 (calculated using light oil properties) and a Schmidt number of ~10^4. The results show that, in contrast to the unsteady RANS model, the LES and unsteady laminar models produce comparable mixing dynamics for two oils in the channel. Analysis of simulations also shows that, for a channel length of 100 m and a height of 0.4 m, the complete mixing of two oils across the channel has not been achieved. We showed that the mixing zone consists of the three different mixing sub-zones, which have been identified using the averaged mass fraction of the heavy oil along the flow direction. The first sub-zone corresponds to the main front propagation area with a length of several heights of the channel. The second and third sub-zones are characterized by so-called shear-flow-driven mixing due to the Kelvin–Helmholtz vortices occurring between oils in the axial direction. It was observed that the third sub-zone has a steeper mass fraction gradient of the heavy oil in the axial direction in comparison with the second sub-zone, which corresponds to the flow-averaged mass fraction of 0.5 for the heavy oil.

The dynamics of a healthy and infected red blood cell in flow through constricted channels: A DPD simulation.

Understanding the dynamics of red blood cell (RBC) motion under in silico conditions is central to the development of cost-effective diagnostic tools. Specifically, unraveling the relationship between the rheological properties and the nature of shape change in the RBC (healthy or infected) can be extremely useful. In case of malarial infection, RBC progressively loses its deformability and tends to occlude the microvessel. In the present study, detailed mesoscopic simulations are performed to investigate the deformation dynamics of an RBC in flow through a constricted channel. Specifically, the manifestation of viscous forces (through flow rates) on the passage and blockage characteristics of a healthy red blood cell (hRBC) vis-á-vis an infected red blood cell (iRBC) are investigated. A finite-sized dissipative particle dynamics framework is used to model plasma in conjunction with a discrete model for the RBC. Instantaneous wall boundary method was used to model no-slip wall boundary conditions with a good control on the near-wall density fluctuations and compressibility effects. To investigate the microvascular occlusion, the RBC motion through 2 types of constricted channels, viz, (1) a tapered microchannel and (2) a stenosed-type microchannel, were simulated. It was observed that the deformation of an infected cell was much less compared with a healthy cell, with an attendant increase in the passage time. Apart from the qualitative features, deformation indices were obtained. The deformation of hRBC was sudden, while the iRBC deformed slowly as it traversed through the constriction. For higher flow rates, both hRBC and iRBC were found to undergo severe deformation. Even under low flow rates, hRBC could easily traverse past the constricted channel. However, for sufficiently slow flow rates (eg, capillary flows), the microchannel was found to be completely blocked by the iRBC.

Water Transport and Removal in PEMFC Gas Flow Channel with Various Water Droplet Locations and Channel Surface Wettability

Water transport and removal in the proton exchange membrane fuel cell (PEMFC) is critically important to fuel cell performance, stability, and durability. Water emerging locations on the membrane-electrode assembly (MEA) surface and the channel surface wettability significantly influence the water transport and removal in PEMFC. In most simulations of water transport and removal in the PEMFC flow channel, liquid water is usually introduced at the center of the MEA surface, which is fortuitous, since water droplet can emerge randomly on the MEA surface in PEMFC. In addition, the commonly used no-slip wall boundary condition greatly confines the water sliding features on hydrophobic MEA/channel surfaces, degrading the simulation accuracy. In this study, water droplet is introduced with various locations along the channel width direction on the MEA surface, and water transport and removal is investigated numerically using an improved model incorporating the sliding flow property by using the shear wall boundary condition. It is found that the water droplet can be driven to the channel sidewall by aerodynamics when the initial water location deviates from the MEA center to a certain amount, forming the water corner flow in the flow channel. The channel surface wettability on the water transport is also studied and is shown to have a significant impact on the water corner flow in the flow channel.

Entropy Stability and the No-Slip Wall Boundary Condition

We present an entropy stable numerical scheme subject to no-slip wall boundary conditions. To enforce entropy stability only the no-penetration boundary condition and a temperature condition are needed at a wall, and this leads to an $L^2$ bound on the conservative variables. In this article, we take the next step and design a finite difference scheme that also bounds the velocity gradients. This necessitates the use of the full no-slip conditions.

Implementation of D3Q19 Lattice Boltzmann Method with a Curved Wall Boundary Condition for Simulation of Practical Flow Problems

In this paper, implementation of an extended form of a no-slip wall boundary condition is presented for the three-dimensional (3-D) lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for solving the incompressible fluid flows with complex geometries. The boundary condition is based on the off-lattice scheme with a polynomial interpolation which is used to reconstruct the curved or irregular wall boundary on the neighboring lattice nodes. This treatment improves the computational efficiency of the solution algorithm to handle complex geometries and provides much better accuracy comparing with the staircase approximation of bounce-back method. The efficiency and accuracy of the numerical approach presented are examined by computing the fluid flows around the geometries with curved or irregular walls. Three test cases considered herein for validating the present computations are the flow calculation around the NACA0012 wing section and through the two different porous media in various flow conditions. The study shows the present computational technique based on the implementation of the three-dimensional Lattice Boltzmann method with the employed curved wall boundary condition is robust and efficient for solving laminar flows with practical geometries and also accurate enough to predict the flow properties used for engineering designs.

Wall-Modeled Large-Eddy Simulation of a High Reynolds Number Separating and Reattaching Flow

The performance of two wall models based on Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes is compared in large-eddy simulation of a high Reynolds number separating and reattaching flow over the NASA wall-mounted hump. Wall modeling significantly improves flow prediction on a coarse grid where the large-eddy simulation with the no-slip wall boundary condition fails. Low-order statistics from the wall-modeled large-eddy simulation are in good agreement with the experiment. Wall-pressure fluctuations from the resolved-scale solution are in good agreement with the experiment, whereas wall shear-stress fluctuations modeled entirely through the wall models appear to be significantly underpredicted. Although the two wall models produce comparable results in the upstream attached flow region, the nonequilibrium wall model outperforms the equilibrium wall model in the separation bubble and recovery region where the key assumptions in the equilibrium model are shown to be invalid.

A numerical investigation of shock propagation in three-dimensional microducts

In the present work, shock propagation and attenuation in three-dimensional microducts with rectangular cross-sections of differing aspect ratios are numerically investigated. The simulations are performed using the Navier–Stokes equations with no-slip wall boundary conditions. The post-shock flow in such microducts resembles a pipe flow, with the extent of the boundary layers comparable with the lateral dimension of the duct. The shock attenuation data are explained on the basis of the viscous dissipation characteristics in the post-shock flow-field, in addition to the behaviour of the boundary layers. It is shown that the three-dimensional effects are adequately modelled using a two-dimensional axisymmetric model or a two-dimensional model, depending on the aspect ratio of the microduct. The data for the shock attenuation are presented in the form of correlations involving the initial Mach number of the shock and a dimensionless parameter that includes the characteristic Reynolds number and the dimensionless shock travel.