Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Flows. Multiblock Techniques. Verification and Experimental Validation
Authors:   , Cadafalch Rabasa Jordi 
Published: October 2023

Work here presented is the result of basic research in key aspects of the currently available engineering tools and methodologies for the design, optimisation and development of thermal systems and equipment: turbulence modelling, high performance computing and quality tests and procedures so as to assess credibility to the numerical solutions (verification and validation). <br/><br/>The thesis comprises six main chapters written in a paper format. Two of them have already been published in international journals, one in the proceedings of a Spanish conference and two in proceedings of international conferences on Computational Fluid Dynamics and heat transfer. The last chapter has recently been submitted for publication to an international journal. Therefore, all the chapters are written so as to be self-contained, complete and concise. As a consequence, some contents of the chapters such those describing the governing equations, or the verification procedure used to assess the credibility of the numerical solutions, are repeated in several of them. Furthermore, as only minor changes have been introduced in the chapters respect to the original papers, each of them reflects the know-how of the CTTC (Heat and Mass Transfer Technological Centre were the research has been carried out) when they were published.<br/><br/>Papers presented in chapters 1 and 2 deal with turbulence modelling. A general overview is given on the formulation and numerical techniques of the different levels of turbulence modelling: Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS), Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes Simulation (RANS). Main attention is focussed on the eddy viscosity two-equation RANS models. Their formulation is presented in more detail, and numerical solutions of the most extended. Benchmark problems on turbulence modelling are given compared to the available experimental data.<br/><br/>Chapters 3 and 4 focus on the use of the multiblock method (domain decomposition method), as a numerical technique that combined with the parallel computing may allow reducing the demanding computational time and memory (high performance computing). The multiblock approach used is based on the conservation of all the physical quantities (fully conservative method) and on an explicit information exchange between the different blocks of the domain. The goal of the work presented in these two chapters is to verify that such a multiblock approach does not introduce additional uncertainty in the numerical solutions.<br/><br/>Chapter 5 presents a tool that has been developed at the CTTC for the verification of finite volume computations. In fact, this tool is also partially used and described in the results presented in the previous chapters. Here, it is described and discussed in detail and it is applied to a set of different CFD and heat transfer problems in two and three dimensions, with free and forced convection, with reactive and non-reactive flows and with laminar and turbulent flows.<br/><br/>The last chapter shows a complete study for the development of a credible heat transfer relation for the heat evacuated from a ventilation channel. Such study comprises all the different steps that have to be accomplished so as to develop credible and applicable results in mechanical engineering. It comprises a description of the mathematical model to represent the physical phenomena in the channel, the numerical model to solve the set of coupled differential equations of the mathematical model, the construction and testing of an ad-hoc experimental set-up, and a verification and validation (V&V) test that guarantees that the numerical solution is an accurate enough approximation of the mathematical model (verification), and that it properly predicts the reality (validation).