Active separation control of high-Re turbulent separated flow over a wall-mounted hump using RANS, DES, and LES turbulence modeling approaches

Most practical flows in engineering applications are turbulent, and exhibit separation which is generally undesirable because of its adverse effects on performance and efficiency. Therefore, control of turbulent separated flows has been a topic of significant interest as it can reduce separation losses. Often, flow control work employs passive techniques to manipulate the flow. Passive-flow control does not require any additional energy source to achieve the control, but is accompanied by additional viscous losses. It is more desirable to employ active techniques as these can be turned on and off, depending on the flow control requirement. The primary goal of the present work is to numerically investigate a high Reynolds number turbulent separated flow. It is Case 3 of the 2004 CFD Validation on Synthetic Jets and Turbulent Separation Control Workshop, http://cfdval2004.larc.nasa.gov/case3.html, conducted by NASA for the flow over a wall-mounted hump. Followed by the baseline flow simulation, i.e, without flow control, active flow control will be investigated using both steady suction jet as well as a "synthetic" jet. Use of synthetic jets has gained popularity in recent times for active flow control because of their ability to transfer linear momentum to the flow system without net-mass injection across the boundary in the vicinity of separation. The present work also implements the use of two jets (steady suction and synthetic jets) as have not been previously implemented for this flow model. For the synthetic-jets case, the work also studies the effect of two jets in opposite phase. The secondary goal of this work is to bring together a variety of turbulence models and simulation approaches for one flow problem. Turbulent Couette flow was used as a model flow problem to validate the flow solver and investigate the performance of different turbulence models and approaches. The flow is simulated using steady and unsteady-state three-dimensional Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations-based turbulence models and three-dimensional time-dependent Detached Eddy Simulation (DES) and Large-Eddy Simulation (LES) methods. Multiple turbulence modeling approaches help to ascertain what models are most appropriate for capturing the physics of this complex separated flow. The various turbulence modeling cases are simulated with the same grid and solution methodology, and the turbulence models' equations are solved with the same numerical method. This ensures that the variances amongst the results obtained with different models are exclusively due to use of the different turbulence models, and indeed enable assessment of the performance of these models with respect to one another. The results will help us better decide what models to choose for flows with adverse pressure gradients, flow separation and control of separated flows.;Validation work using Turbulent Couette flow demonstrates that, for LES, a fine enough grid is required throughout the computational domain and not just near the wall, to capture the turbulent flow structures and flow physics. For the flow over the wall-mounted hump, the simulation results agree well with experiment. Significant computational-resources savings was realized by using an analytical exit velocity profile for the active flow control jets, instead of simulating the entire flow-control manifold without sacrificing the quality of the work. Results compared with experimental values were surface pressure coefficient, skin friction coefficient, mean velocity profiles, Reynolds stresses and flow reattachment locations. Simulation results show some degree of variation with experimental results in the separated flow region. The steady-suction active control was able to reduce the reattachment length the most. The region of negative streamwise velocity was the smallest in the active flow control with steady suction. The multiple jets cases, with steady suction and synthetic jets, were able to reduce the length of separation bubble in comparison to the corresponding single jet cases. The synthetic jets case, using two jets in opposite phase, was able to achieve the most uniform velocity field in the separation bubble region. The work shows great promise in implementing active flow control, using single and multiple jets, for separated flow at high Reynolds number.