Wall roughness induces asymptotic ultimate turbulence

Turbulence is omnipresent in Nature and technology, governing the transport of heat, mass, and momentum on multiple scales. For real-world applications of wall-bounded turbulence, the underlying surfaces are virtually always rough; yet characterizing and understanding the effects of wall roughness for turbulence remains a challenge, especially for rotating and thermally driven turbulence. By combining extensive experiments and numerical simulations, here, taking as example the paradigmatic Taylor-Couette system (the closed flow between two independently rotating coaxial cylinders), we show how wall roughness greatly enhances the overall transport properties and the corresponding scaling exponents. If only one of the walls is rough, we reveal that the bulk velocity is slaved to the rough side, due to the much stronger coupling to that wall by the detaching flow structures. If both walls are rough, the viscosity dependence is thoroughly eliminated in the boundary layers and we thus achieve asymptotic ultimate turbulence, i.e. the upper limit of transport, whose existence had been predicted by Robert Kraichnan in 1962 (Phys. Fluids {\bf 5}, 1374 (1962)) and in which the scalings laws can be extrapolated to arbitrarily large Reynolds numbers

Large-eddy simulation of a vertical axis tidal turbine using an immersed boundary method

Vertical Axis Tidal Turbines (VATTs) are an innovative way of harnessing renewable energy from tidal streams. Herein a novel numerical approach using a refined Large Eddy Simulation (LES) code to simulate the performance of a VATT is presented. The turbine blades are modelled with Lagrangian markers using the Immersed Boundary Method which offers several advantages especially concerning computational effort. Comparisons of the LES results with experimental and numerical data suggest reasonably good accuracy of the code. In addition, the stability of the method for high Reynolds number flows is also discussed

Modeling the pore level fluid flow in porous media using the immersed boundary method

This chapter demonstrates the potential of the immersed boundary method for the direct numerical simulation of the flow through porous media. A 2D compact finite differences method was employed to solve the unsteady incompressible Navier-Stokes equations with fourth-order Runge-Kutta temporal discretization and fourth-order compact schemes for spatial discretization. The solutions were obtained in a Cartesian grid, with all the associated advantages. The porous media is made of equal size square cylinders in a staggered arrangement and is bounded by solid walls. The transverse and longitudinal distances between cylinders are equal to two cylinder diameters and at the inlet a fully developed velocity profile is specified. The Reynolds number based on the cylinder diameter and maximum inlet velocity ranges from 40 to 80. The different flow regimes are identified and characterised, along with the prediction of the Reynolds number at which transition from steady to unsteady flow takes place. Additionally, the average drag and lift coefficients are presented as a function of the Reynolds number