Turbulent separated inert and reactive flows over a triangular bluff body

Application Challenge AC2-12 © copyright ERCOFTAC 2019

Description

Introduction

Turbulent separated bluff-body flows are encountered in many industrial applications, such as external aerodynamics and gas turbine combustors. This type of flow is associated with separation of the boundary layers, vortex shedding and bluff-body stabilized combustion and has long been of interest to scientists and engineers. The goal of the study on which this AC is based has been to replicate experiments carried out in a test rig at Volvo [1,2,3]. Due to the simple geometry, this test case is quite attractive for verifying and validating new algorithms and models in the frame of computational fluid dynamics (hereafter CFD). The knowledge obtained can be applied to assess the predictive capabilities of the state-of-the-art CFD codes to model and simulate unsteady combustion physics. The numerical results reported here are based on the work published in [4].

Relevance to Industrial Sector

There are at least two fields of application, where turbulent bluff-body flows play a significant role. The first one is external (or internal) aerodynamics. The second one is combustion applications, where flame stabilization is achieved using bluff-bodies. The latter is one of the most used approaches in a variety of propulsion and industrial combustion systems. It is employed for supplementary firing in industrial boilers and heat recovery steam generators, and is also used in ramjet and turbojet afterburner systems [5]. In addition, it is often used in fundamental studies (both experimental and numerical) of turbulent wakes and flame characteristics or as computational test case for the development of new models [5].

Contributed by: D.A. Lysenko and M. Donskov — 3DMSimtek AS, Sandnes, Norway