Experimental and Computational Investigation of a Fractal Grid Wake

TL;DR

This study combines wind tunnel experiments and CFD simulations, including novel DDES modeling, to analyze the complex multi-scale turbulence generated by a fractal grid, validating results through detailed statistical comparisons.

Contribution

First application of DDES simulations to fractal grid turbulence, providing new insights into multi-scale flow structures and validating CFD with experimental data.

Findings

Fractal grids produce multi-scale turbulence with complex interactions.

CFD simulations closely match experimental measurements.

Distinct turbulent structures identified in near-grid region.

Abstract

Fractal grids generate turbulence by exciting many length scales of different sizes simultaneously rather than using the nonlinear cascade mechanism to obtain multi-scale structures, as it is the case for regular grids. The interest in these grids has been further building up since the surprising findings stemming from the experimental and computational studies conducted on these grids. This work presents experimental wind tunnel and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) studies of the turbulent flow generated by a space-filling fractal square grid. The experimental work includes Particle Image Velocimetry (PIV) and hot-wire measurements. In addition, Delayed Detached Eddy Simulations (DDES) with a Spalart-Allmaras background turbulence model are conducted using the open-source package OpenFOAM. This is the first time DDES simulations are used to simulate and characterize the turbulent flow generated by a fractal grid. Finally, this article reports on the extensive statistical study and the direct comparison between the experimentally and numerically acquired time series to investigate and compare one-point- and two-point statistics. Our goal is to validate our computational results and provide enhanced insight into the complexity of the multi-scale generation of turbulence using a fractal grid with a low number of fractal iterations. In particular, we investigate the different turbulent structures and their complex interaction in the near-grid region or the production regime of the fractal grid flow.