SFB 1313 Publication "Interface-Resolved Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Flow over Porous Media"

New SFB 1313 publication (University of Stuttgart), published in High Performance Computing in Science and Engineering '19 / Springer. The paper has been prepared within SFB 1313's research project A02:

"Interface-Resolved Direct Numerical Simulation of Turbulent Flow over Porous Media"

Authors

• Xu Chu (University of Stuttgart, Alumnus of SFB 1313 research project A02)
• Johannes Müller (University of Stuttgart, SFB 1313 research project A02)
• Bernhard Weigand (University of Stuttgart, SFB 1313 research project A02)

Abstract

Direct numerical simulations (DNS) are conducted for turbulent flows over porous media. A high-order spectral/hp element method is adopted for solving the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. Resolving flow details close to the interface relies on an adaptive polynomial refinement based on a conforming mesh. Four DNS cases up to bulk Reynolds number Re=15,000 are conducted with a total mesh resolution up to 1 billion degrees of freedom. The highly-resolved DNS enables us to focus on two major physical phenomenon: (i) the turbulence modulation including drag reduction and flow control; (ii) the turbulent/non-turbulent interface close to the porous surface. The numerical solver exhibits an excellent scalability up to 96k cores on Hazel Hen. Strong scaling tests indicate an efficiency of 70% with around 5, 000 mesh-nodes per core, which indicates a high potential for an adequate use of current and next-generation HPC platforms to investigate turbulent flows over porous media.