Unstructured Spectral Element Methods for Simulation of Turbulent Flows
Abstract
In this paper we present a spectral element-Fourier algorithm for simulating incompressible turbulent flows in complex geometries using unstructured quadrilateral meshes. To this end, we compare two different interface formulations for extending the conforming spectral element method in order to allow for surgical mesh refinement and still retain spectral accuracy: the Zanolli iterative procedure and variational patching based on auxiliary "mortar" functions. We present an interpretation of the original mortar element method as a patching scheme and develop direct and iterative solution techniques that make the method efficient for simulations of turbulent flows. The properties of the new method are analyzed in detail by studying the eigenspectra of the advection and diffusion operators. We then present numerical results that illustrate the flexibility as well as the exponential convergence of the new algorithm for nonconforming discretizations. We conclude with simulation studies of the turbulent cylinder wake at Re = 1000 (external flow) and turbulent flow over riblets at Re = 3280 (internal flow).
Additional Information
© 1995 Academic Press. Received December 9, 1994; revised May 12, 1995. We thank Catherine Crawford for preparing the riblet data and figures. Our turbulent flow simulations were performed in part using the Intel Paragon System operated by Caltech on behalf of the Concurrent Supercomputing Consortium. Access to this facility was provided by the California Institute of Technology. Primary financial support for this work was provided by the Office of Naval Research through Grant N00014-90-J-1315. Supplementary support was provided by the AFOSR under Contract F49620-94-1-0313. The first author gratefully acknowledges further support from an AASERT fellowship paid for by Grant N00014-93-0791. Computing time and resources for the turbulent wake calculations reported here were made possible by the National Science Foundation under Grant CDA-9318145.Additional details
- Eprint ID
- 80015
- DOI
- 10.1006/jcph.1995.1208
- Resolver ID
- CaltechAUTHORS:20170809-110259292
- N00014-90-J-1315
- Office of Naval Research (ONR)
- F49620-94-1-0313
- Air Force Office of Scientific Research (AFOSR)
- N00014-93-0791
- Office of Naval Research (ONR)
- CDA-9318145
- NSF
- Created
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2017-08-09Created from EPrint's datestamp field
- Updated
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2021-11-15Created from EPrint's last_modified field