A fully coupled OpenFOAM® solver for transient incompressible turbulent flows in ALE formulation

Abstract

In this article, the previously developed single block fully coupled algorithm [1 L. Mangani, M. Buchmayr, and M. Darwish, Development of a Novel Fully Coupled Solver in OpenFOAM: Steady-State Incompressible Turbulent Flows, Numer. Heat Transfer B Fund., vol. 66, pp. 1–20, 2014.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar],2 L. Mangani, M. Buchmayr, and M. Darwish, Development of a Novel Fully Coupled Solver in OpenFOAM: Steady-state Incompressible Turbulent Flows in Rotational Reference Frames, Numer. Heat Transfer B Fund., vol. 66, pp. 526–543, 2014.[Taylor & Francis Online], [Web of Science ®] , [Google Scholar]] for solving three-dimensional incompressible turbulent flows is extended to resolve transient flows in multiple rotating reference frames using the arbitrary Lagrange–Euler (ALE) formulation. Details on the discretization of ALE terms along with a recently developed extension to the conservative and fully implicit treatment of multi-block interfaces into three-dimensional space are presented. To account for turbulence, the kω − SST turbulence model in ALE formulation is solved using Navier–Stokes equations. This multi-block transient coupled algorithm is embedded within the OpenFOAM® Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) library, and its performance evaluated in a real case involving a turbulent flow field in a swirl generator by comparing numerical predictions with experimental measurements.