Feasibility study of an adaptive large eddy simulation method

A novel method for simulating turbulent flows called Stochastic Coherent Adaptive Large Eddy Simulation (SCALES) is introduced. The theoretical basis for SCALES is presented using results from a priori testing of homogenious turbulence along with a novel Coherency Diagram of a turbulent field that physically relates Direct Numerical Simulation to different Large Eddy capturing methods, such as SCALES, CVS, LES and VLES. Results from a priori testing show that given the same compression ratio the SCALES method will result in a significantly lower level of subgrid scale dissipation that needs to be modeled in comparison to LES. The feasibility of SCALES is demonstrated by considering numerical simulations of two dimensional flow around a cylinder for Reynolds numbers in the range 3 × 10¹ ≤ Re ≤ 10⁵ using an adaptive wavelet collocation method. It is demonstrated in actual dynamic simulations that the compression scales like Re^1/2 over five orders of magnitude, while computational complexity scales like Re. This represents a significant improvement over the naive complexity estimate of Re^9/4 for two-dimensional turbulence. © 2003 by Daniel E. Goldstein.