Experimental validation of computational fluid dynamics for solving isothermal and incompressible viscous fluid flow

Abstract

In order to validate a computational method for solving viscous fluid flows, experiments are carried out in an eccentric cylindrical cavity showing various flow formations over a range of Reynolds numbers. Especially, in numerical solution approaches for isothermal and incompressible flows, we search for simple experimental data for evaluating accuracy as well as performance of the computational method. Verification of different computational methods is arduous, and analytic solutions are only obtained for simple geometries like a channel flow. Clearly, a method is expected to predict different flow patterns within a cavity. Thus, we propose a configuration generating different flow formations depending on the Reynolds number and make the experimental results freely available in order to be used as an assessment criterion to demonstrate the reliability of a new computational approach.