The Incremental Unknowns - a multilevel scheme for the simulation of turbulent channel flows

Abstract

In numerical simulation of complex flows, it is important to identify different length scales of the flow and treat them differently. In this report, we introduce a new multilevel scheme for simulating turbulent channel flows. Two different versions of the scheme, namely the spectral and finite difference versions, are presented. The spectral version of the scheme is based on a spectral-Galerkin formulation which provides a natural decomposition of the flow into small and large wavelength parts, and which leads to linear systems that can be solved with quasi-optimal computational complexity. In the finite difference version, the "Incremental Unknown'' (IU) is used to separate the length scales. Preliminary numerical results indicate that the scheme is well suited for turbulence computations and provides results which are comparable to that by Direct Numerical Simulation but with significantly less CPU time.