Channel Flow results The boxes of turbulence are the simplest imaginable turbulent flow case. However, real life flows are considerably more complex, involving inhomogeneous, anisotropic turbulence, and interacting with solid bodies and walls.
Walls are particularly troublesome, since the nature of the turbulent flow changes close to a wall.
As you approach a wall, you pass through several flow regimes, and the turbulent vortices flatten out and change scale. All of this causes problems for any turbulent modelling technique. Standard RAS methods tend to involve wall functions, which are empirically-determined functions that describe the behaviour of velocity, turbulent energy etc. In order to investigate flows near walls, we investigated the simplest possible case, which is that of flow in a channel. One of the areas we have been investigating is the possibility of treating wall boundary layers by mesh refinement normal to the wall.