Compound Wall Treatment for RANS Computation of Complex Turbulent Flows and Heat Transfer

Abstract

We present a generalised treatment of the wall boundary conditions for RANS computation of turbulent flows and heat transfer. The method blends the integration up to the wall (ItW) with the generalised wall functions (GWF) that include non-equilibrium effects. Wall boundary condition can thus be defined irrespective of whether the wall-nearest grid point lies within the viscous sublayer, in the buffer zone, or in the fully turbulent region. The computations with fine and coarse meshes of a steady and pulsating flow in a plane channel, in flow behind a backward-facing step and in a round impinging jet using the proposed compound wall treatment (CWT) are all in satisfactory agreement with the available experiments and DNS data. The method is recommended for computations of industrial flows in complex domains where it is difficult to generate a computational grid that will satisfy a priori either the ItW or WF prerequisites.