Indoor ventilation is underutilized for the control of exposure to infectious pathogens. Occupancy restrictions during the pandemic showed the acute need to control detailed airflow patterns, particularly in heavily occupied spaces, such as lecture halls or offices, and not just to focus on air changes. Displacement ventilation is increasingly considered a viable energy efficient approach. However, control of airflow patterns from displacement ventilation requires us to understand them first. The challenge in doing so is that, on the one hand, detailed numerical simulations – such as direct numerical simulations (DNSs) – enable the most accurate assessment of the flow, but they are computationally prohibitively costly, thus impractical. On the other hand, large eddy simulations (LES) use parametrizations instead of explicitly capturing small-scale flow processes critical to capturing the inhomogeneous mixing and fluid–boundary interactions. Moreover, their use for generalizable insights requires extensive validation against experiments or already validated gold-standard DNSs. In this study, we start to address this challenge by employing efficient monotonically integrated LES (MILES) to simulate airflows in large-scale geometries and benchmark against relevant gold-standard DNSs. We discuss the validity and limitations of MILES. Via its application to a lecture hall, we showcase its emerging potential as an assessment tool for indoor air mixing heterogeneity.

Direct numerical simulations have been applied to simulate flows with polymer additives. FENE-P (finite-extensible-nonlinear-elastic-Peterlin) dumbbell model solving for the conformation tensor is adopted to investigate the influence of the polymer on the flowfield. Boundary treatments of the conformation tensor on the flowfield are examined first, where boundary condition based on the linear extrapolation scheme provides more accurate results with second-order accurate error norms. Further simulations of the turbulent channel flow at different Weissenberg numbers are also conducted to investigate the influence on drag reduction. Drag reduction increases in tandem with the increase of Weissenberg number and the increase saturates at Weτ~200, where the drag reduction is close to the maximum drag reduction (MDR) limit. At the regime of y+ > 5, the viscous layer thickens with the increase of the Weissenberg number showing a departure from the traditional log-law profile, and the velocity profiles approach the MDR line at high Weissenberg number. The Reynolds stress decreases in tandem with the increase of Weτ, whereas the levels of laminar stress and polymer stress act adversely. However, as the Weissenberg number increases, the proportion of the laminar stress in the total stress increases, and this contributes to the drag reduction of the polymer flow.

Vortex and vorticity are two correlated but fundamentally different concepts which have been the central issues in fluid mechanics research. Vorticity has rigorous mathematical definition (curl of velocity), but no clear physical meaning. Vortex has clear physical meaning (rotation) but no rigorous mathematical definition. For a long time, many people treat them as a same thing. However, based on our high-order direct numerical simulation (DNS), we found that first, “vortex” is not “vorticity tube” or “vortex tube” which is widely defined as a bundle of vorticity lines without any vorticity line leak. Actually, vortex is an open area for vorticity line penetration. Second, vortex is not necessarily congregation of vorticity lines, but dispersion in many 3-dimensional cases. Some textbooks say that vortex cannot end inside the flow field but must end on the solid wall (and/or boundaries). Our DNS observation and many other numerical results show almost all vortices are ended inside the flow field. Finally, a more theoretical study shows that neither vortex nor vorticity line can attach to the solid wall and they must be detached from the wall.

In this paper Lattice Boltzmann Method (LBM) has been used in order to perform Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) for porous media analysis. Among the different configurations of porous media, open cell metallic foams are gaining a key role for a large number of applications, like heat exchangers for high performance cars or aeronautic components as well. Their structure allows improving heat transfer process with fruitful advantages for packaging issues and size reduction. In order to better understand metallic foam capabilities, a random sphere generation code has been implemented and fluid-dynamic simulations have been carried out by means of a kinetic approach. After having defined a computational domain the Reynolds number influence has been studied with the aim of characterizing both pressure drop and friction factor throughout a finite foam volume. In order to validate the proposed model, a comparison analysis with experimental data has been carried out too.

Three high order shock-capturing schemes are compared for large eddy simulations (LES) of temporally evolving mixing layers for different convective Mach numbers ranging from the quasi-incompressible regime to highly compressible supersonic regime. The considered high order schemes are fifth-order WENO (WENO5), seventh-order WENO (WENO7) and the associated eighth-order central spatial base scheme with the dissipative portion of WENO7 as a nonlinear post-processing filter step (WENO7fi). This high order nonlinear filter method of Yee & Sjögreen is designed for accurate and efficient simulations of shock-free compressible turbulence, turbulence with shocklets and turbulence with strong shocks with minimum tuning of scheme parameters. The LES results by WENO7fi using the same scheme parameter agree well with experimental results compiled by Barone et al., and published direct numerical simulations (DNS) work of Rogers & Moser and Pantano & Sarkar, whereas results by WENO5 and WENO7 compare poorly with experimental data and DNS computations.

Particle dynamics in a turbulent channel flow is considered. The effects of particle concentration and Reynolds number on the particle velocity statistics are investigated. Four different particle response times, τ+=1, 5, 30 and 100, are examined for three different Reynolds numbers, Re*=200, 360 and 790 (based on channel height and friction velocity). The particle concentration evolves with time and statistics obtained during three different sampling periods might be distinctly different. The mean and fluctuating particle velocities are substantially affected both by the particle response time and by the Reynolds number of the flow.

In order to analyse the geometric structure of turbulent flow patterns and their statistics for various scalar fields we adopt the dissipation element (DE) approach and apply it to turbulent channel flow by employing direct numerical simulations (DNS) of the Navier–Stokes equations. Gradient trajectories starting from any point in a scalar field in the directions of ascending and descending scalar gradients will always reach an extremum, i.e. a minimum or a maximum point, where . The set of all points and trajectories belonging to the same pair of extremal points defines a dissipation element. Extending previous DE approaches, which were only applied to homogeneous turbulence, we here focus on exploring the influence of solid walls on the dissipation element distribution. Employing group-theoretical methods and known symmetries of Navier–Stokes equations, we observe for the core region of the flow, i.e. the region beyond the buffer layer, that the probability distribution function (p.d.f.) of the DE length exhibits an invariant functional form, in other words, self-similar behaviour with respect to the wall distance. This is further augmented by the scaling behaviour of the mean DE length scale which shows a linear scaling with the wall distance. The known proportionality of the mean DE length and the Taylor length scale is also revisited. Utilizing a geometric analogy we give the number of DE elements as a function of the wall distance. Further, it is observed that the DE p.d.f. is rather insensitive, i.e. invariant with respect both to the Reynolds number and the actual scalar which has been employed for the analysis. In fact, a very remarkable degree of isotropy is observed for the DE p.d.f. in regions of high shear. This is in stark contrast to classical Kolmogorov scaling laws which usually exhibit a strong dependence on quantities such as shear, anisotropy and Reynolds number. In addition, Kolmogorov’s scaling behaviour is in many cases only visible for very large Reynolds numbers. This is rather different in the present DE approach which applies also for low Reynolds numbers. Moreover, we show that the DE p.d.f. agrees very well with the log-normal distribution and derive a log-normal p.d.f. model taking into account the wall-normal dependence. Finally, the conditional mean scalar differences of the turbulent kinetic energy at the extremal points of DE are examined. We present a power law with scaling exponent of known from Kolmogorov’s hypothesis for the centre of the channel and a logarithmic law near the wall.

Homogeneous isotropic turbulence has been playing a key role in the research of turbulence theory. And the pseudo-spectral method is the most popular numerical method to simulate this type of flow fields in a periodic box, where fast Fourier transform (FFT) is mostly effective. However, the bottle-neck in this method is the memory of computer, which motivates us to construct a memory-saving algorithm for spectral method in present paper. Inevitably, more times of FFT are needed as compensation. In the most memory-saving situation, only 6 three-dimension arrays are employed in the code. The cost of computation is increased by a factor of 4, and that 38 FFTs are needed per time step instead of the previous 9 FFTs. A simulation of isotropic turbulence on 20483 grid can be implemented on a 256G distributed memory clusters through this method.

The flow field around a 6:1 prolate spheroid has been investigated by means of direct numerical simulations. Contrary to earlier studies the major axis of the spheroid was oriented perpendicular to the oncoming flow. At the subcritical Reynolds number 10 000 the laminar boundary layer separated from the frontal side of the spheroid and formed an elliptical vortex sheet. The detached shear layer was unstable from its very inception and even the near-wake turned out to be turbulent. The Strouhal number associated with the large-scale shedding was 0.156, significantly below that of the wake of a sphere. A higher-frequency mode was associated with Kelvin–Helmholtz instabilities in the detached shear layer. The shape of the near-wake mirrored the shape of the spheroid. Some 10 minor diameters downstream, the major axis of the wake became aligned with the minor axis of the spheroid.