Fluid-kinetic multiscale solver for wall-bounded turbulence

TL;DR

This paper introduces a coupled fluid-kinetic simulation method combining DSMC and HOLB to study wall-bounded turbulence at high Reynolds numbers, enabling detailed insights into transition mechanisms.

Contribution

The novel two-level coupling of DSMC and HOLB allows for efficient, accurate simulation of near-wall turbulence transition at finite Knudsen numbers.

Findings

Validated by simulating plane Poiseuille and Couette flows.

First evidence of observing coherent structure regeneration cycles.

Coupling enables capturing near-wall non-equilibrium effects and bulk flow simultaneously.

Abstract

We present a two-level (fluid-kinetic) coupling procedure for the simulation of wall-bounded flows at Reynolds numbers up to thousands. The method combines a kinetic Direct Simulation Monte Carlo (DSMC) treatment of the near-wall layer, with a high-order Lattice-Boltzmann (HOLB) scheme as a fluid solver in the bulk flow. Given the kinetic nature of HOLB, this coupling is expected to provide a physically accurate treatment of the near-wall instabilities which trigger the transition to turbulence above a critical threshold around $Re_c \sim 750$. The coupled DSMC-HOLB solver is validated by simulating plane Poiseuille and Couette flows far from equilibrium, i.e at finite Knudsen number regimes. Based on this validation, we provide the first preliminary evidence that the combination of HOLB and DSMC permits to observe the regeneration cycles of coherent structures which arise above a critical value of the Reynolds number. This task would be hardly attainable by either of the two solvers separately; while DSMC can capture strong near-wall non-equilibrium effects, it lacks the compute power to deal with both near-wall and bulk flow at the same time. We look to HOLB to make it computationally feasible to perform such a simulation. The present two-level coupling procedure may pave the way to a new generation of fluid-kinetic simulations of wall-bounded turbulent flows, thus helping to gain deeper insights into the role of wall micro-corrugations in triggering the dynamic instabilities that drive the transition to turbulent regimes.