NEW VERSION OF SIMPLET AND ITS APPLICATION TO TURBULENT BUOYANCY-DRIVEN FLOWS

The essence of the SIMPLE method lies in its coupling between the momentum and continuity equations. One common feature of the SIMPLE family of methods (such as SIMPLER, SIMPLEC) is that the corrected velocity is obtained from the corrected pressure only. The SIMPLET algorithm was recently developed to take into consideration the effect of the temperature correction on the velocity correction based on the Boussinesq approximation. Because of this approximation, it is only valid for small temperature differences in the field. In the present article, a new version of SIMPLET is developed to remove this restriction and therefore make it applicable to general cases. When there are large temperature variations in flow fields, flows with appreciable length scales are nearly always turbulent, and turbulence model equations must be introduced into the governing equations. Computational examples are provided to illustrate the application of SIMPLET to turbulent buoyancy-driven flows using the renormalization group (RNG) turbulence model.