CFD of Fully Developed Channel Flow

Abstract

Turbulent flow, characterized by random and chaotic fluid motion, is a common occurrence in many engineering applications, such as aerospace, wind turbines, hydroelectric power plants, and chemical mixing processes. In these applications and others, the turbulent flows often involve complex geometries, multiple scales of motion, and nonlinear interactions, which make it challenging to simulate and predict turbulent flow behaviour accurately. As a result, turbulence modelling plays a crucial role in these applications by providing an efficient and cost-effective way to model the complex physics of turbulent flows. Several turbulence models have been developed and are commonly used in computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations to predict the behaviour of turbulent flows. In this work, the Navier-Stokes equations and transport equations of turbulent kinetic energy and turbulent dissipation are solved using finite difference approximation. In-house MATLAB code is developed in this work to solve the two-dimensional, incompressible, fully developed turbulent channel flow for Reynolds number ranged from 6000 to 12000.

The code has accurately predicted the flow structure in the fully developed turbulent channel flow and for all Reynolds numbers. The velocity, pressure, turbulent kinetic energy, and turbulent dissipation are all aligned with physics and supported by literature data. The turbulent averaged. The averaged turbulent u-velocity profile flattens at the channel core while dramatically changes near wall with power law. The pressure distribution.