Section: Application Domains

Simulation of turbulent flows

Turbulent flows are ubiquitous in industrial applications.

Direct numerical simulation (DNS), which aims at complete resolution of the flow field up to the Kolmogorov scale, has historically been limited to very simple geometries. However, the increase of computational power and many improvements of specialized numerical methods open the door to a wider range of applications.

Our objectives are first to develop a tool for simulation of incompressible turbulent flows in simple geometries such as the flow around simple objects and the flow through holes and later extend it to compressible flows. Due to the required spacial and temporal resolution, the software has to be extremely efficient with respect to computation speed and memory usage. To this end we use non-conforming finite elements with multi-grid solvers on block-structured, possibly anisotropic, meshes.