Direct numerical simulations (DNS) and experiments are carried out to study fully developed turbulent pipe flow at Reynolds number Rec ≈ 7000 based on centreline velocity and pipe diameter. The agreement between numerical and experimental results is excellent for the lower-order statistics (mean flow and turbulence intensities) and reasonably good for the higher-order statistics (skewness and flatness factors). To investigate the differences between fully developed turbulent flow in an axisymmetric pipe and a plane channel geometry, the present DNS results are compared to those obtained from a channel flow simulation. Beside the mean flow properties and turbulence statistics up to fourth order, the energy budgets of the Reynolds-stress components are computed and compared. The present results show that the mean velocity profile in the pipe fails to conform to the accepted law of the wall, in contrast to the channel flow. This confirms earlier observations reported in the literature. The statistics on fluctuating velocities, including the energy budgets of the Reynolds stresses, appear to be less affected by the axisymmetric pipe geometry. Only the skewness factor of the normal-to-the-wall velocity fluctuations differs in the pipe flow compared to the channel flow. The energy budgets illustrate that the normal-to-the-wall velocity fluctuations in the pipe are altered owing to a different ‘impingement’ or ‘splatting’ mechanism close to the curved wall.

Direct numerical simulation databases of turbulent channel and pipe flow have been used in order to assess the energy transfer between resolved and unresolved motions in large-eddy simulations. To this end, the velocity fields are split into three parts: a statistically stationary mean flow, the resolved, and the unresolved turbulent fluctuations. The distinction between the resolved and unresolved motions is based on the application of a cutoff filter in spectral space. Within the buffer layer a backward transfer of averaged kinetic energy from subgrid to grid-scale turbulent motions has been found to exist, which is primarily caused by subgrid-scale stresses aligned with the mean rates of strain. Such reverse transfer generally cannot be described by the simple eddy-viscosity-type subgrid models usually applied in large-eddy simulations. The use of a conditional averaging technique revealed that the reverse transfer of energy within the near-wall flow is strongly enhanced by coherent motions, such as the well-known bursting events.

Sempa brings together researchers from computer science, mechanical engineering, and numerical analysis to develop softwareengineering methods for parallelizing existing scientific-computing software packages. To define and evaluate these methods, the researchers implemented a parallel version of TfC, a computational fluid dynamics simulation program.

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