An OpenFOAM pressure-based coupled CFD solver for turbulent and compressible flows in turbomachinery applications

Abstract

In this article, a recently developed pressure-based, fully coupled solver capable of predicting fluid flow at all speeds is extended to deal with turbulent flows in a rotating frame of reference and emphasizing turbomachinery applications. The pressure–velocity coupling at the heart of the Navier-Stokes equations is resolved by deriving a pressure equation in a similar fashion to a segregated SIMPLE algorithm but with implicit treatment of the velocity and pressure fields. The resulting system of coupled equations is solved using an algebraic multigrid solver. The above numerical procedures have been implemented within OpenFOAM®, which is an open-source code framework capable of dealing with industrial-scale flow problems. The OpenFOAM-based coupled solver is validated using experimental and numerical data available from reference literature test cases as well as with a segregated solver based on the SIMPLE algorithm. This is done in addition to evaluating its performance by solving an industrial problem. In comparison with the segregated solver, the coupled solver results indicate substantial reduction in computational cost with increased robustness.