Inflow conditions for inhomogeneous turbulent flows

Abstract

Abstract A cost‐effective method to generate inflow conditions for direct numerical simulations of wall‐bounded flows is presented. The method recycles a finite‐length time series of instantaneous velocity planes extracted from a precursor simulation and has earlier proved efficient for free shear layers. Now a spatially developing plane channel flow is considered. Different durations t s of the time series are tested and compared. Excellent agreement with fully developed channel flow statistics is observed when t s equals or exceeds the large‐eddy turnover time scale. The present results are more realistic than those obtained with synthetic turbulence generation and at the same time substantially cheaper than running an auxiliary simulation in parallel. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.