Simulation of turbulent flow past bluff bodies on coarse meshes using general Galerkin methods: drag crisis and turbulent Euler solutions (Q1015526)

The author computes turbulent flow past a bluff body, including the case when the boundary layers are turbulent. Precisely, the author has extended the G2 technique (general Galerkin, i.e., adaptive stabilized finite element methods) to this class of problems by using a very simple wall-model in the form of a friction boundary condition with an associated friction parameter \(\beta\). In particular, the author uses G2 to simulate the drag crisis for a circular cylinder, where it will be possible to capture the delayed separation on a coarse mesh, by adjusting \(\beta\) to match experimental results. The author also considers the cases \(Re\rightarrow\infty\) and \(\beta\rightarrow0\), corresponding to G2 for Euler equations with slip boundary conditions, which is referred to as an extended Galerkin (EG2) method. The only parameter in EG2 method is the discretization parameter, and the computational results indicate that EG2 may be used to model very high Reynolds numbers flows (such as geophysical flows).