Premium
Efficient computation of mean drag for the subcritical flow past a circular cylinder using general Galerkin G2
Author(s) -
Hoffman J.
Publication year - 2008
Publication title -
international journal for numerical methods in fluids
Language(s) - English
Resource type - Journals
SCImago Journal Rank - 0.938
H-Index - 112
eISSN - 1097-0363
pISSN - 0271-2091
DOI - 10.1002/fld.1865
Subject(s) - galerkin method , mathematics , reynolds number , turbulence , large eddy simulation , cylinder , computational fluid dynamics , flow (mathematics) , drag coefficient , drag , finite element method , computation , navier–stokes equations , mathematical analysis , geometry , mechanics , algorithm , physics , compressibility , thermodynamics
General Galerkin (G2) is a new computational method for turbulent flow, where a stabilized Galerkin finite element method is used to compute approximate weak solutions to the Navier–Stokes equations directly, without any filtering of the equations as in a standard approach to turbulence simulation, such as large eddy simulation, and thus no Reynolds stresses are introduced, which need modelling. In this paper, G2 is used to compute the drag coefficient c D for the flow past a circular cylinder at Reynolds number Re =3900, for which the flow is turbulent. It is found that it is possible to approximate c D to an accuracy of a few percent, corresponding to the accuracy in experimental results for this problem, using less than 10 5 mesh points, which makes the simulations possible using a standard PC. The mesh is adaptively refined until a stopping criterion is reached with respect to the error in a chosen output of interest, which in this paper is c D . Both the stopping criterion and the mesh‐refinement strategy are based on a posteriori error estimates, in the form of a space–time integral of residuals times derivatives of the solution of a dual problem, linearized at the approximate solution, and with data coupling to the output of interest. Copyright © 2008 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.