No Arabic abstract
Atmospheric flows exhibit long-range spatiotemporal correlations manifested as the fractal geometry to the global cloud cover pattern concomitant with inverse power-law form for power spectra of temporal fluctuations of all scales ranging from turbulence (millimeters-seconds) to climate (thousands of kilometers-years). Long-range spatiotemporal correlations are ubiquitous to dynamical systems in nature and are identified as signatures of self-organized criticality. Standard models for turbulent fluid flows in meteorological theory cannot explain satisfactorily the observed multifractal (space-time) structures in atmospheric flows. Numerical models for simulation and prediction of atmospheric flows are subject to deterministic chaos and give unrealistic solutions. Deterministic chaos is a direct consequence of round-off error growth in iterative computations. Round-off error of finite precision computations doubles on an average at each step of iterative computations. Round-off error will propagate to the mainstream computation and give unrealistic solutions in numerical weather prediction and climate models which incorporate thousands of iterative computations in long-term numerical integration schemes. A recently developed non-deterministic cell dynamical system model for atmospheric flows predicts the observed self-organized criticality as intrinsic to quantumlike mechanics governing flow dynamics. Further, the fractal space-time structure to the stringlike atmospheric flow trajectory is resolved into a continuum of eddies. The eddy circulations obey Kepler third law of planetary motion and therefore eddy inertial masses obey Newton inverse square law of gravitation on all scales from microscopic to macroscale.
Parameter extension simulation (PES) as a mathematical method for simulating turbulent flows has been proposed in the study. It is defined as a calculation of the turbulent flow for the desired parameter values with the help of a reference solution. A typical PES calculation is composed of three consecutive steps: Set up the asymptotic relationship between the desired solution and the reference solution; Calculate the reference solution and the necessary asymptotic coefficients; Extend the reference solution to the desired parameter values. A controlled eddy simulation (CES) method has been developed to calculate the reference solution and the asymptotic coefficients. The CES method is a special type of large eddy simulation (LES) method in which a weight coefficient and an artificial force distribution are used to model part of the turbulent motions. The artificial force distribution is modeled based on the eddy viscosity assumption. The reference weight coefficient and the asymptotic coefficients can be determined through a weight coefficient convergence study. The proposed PES/CES method has been used to simulate four types of turbulent flows. They are decaying homogeneous and isotropic turbulence, smooth wall channel flows, rough wall channel flows, and compressor blade cascade flows. The numerical results show that the 0-order PES solution (or the reference CES solution) has a similar accuracy as a traditional LES solution, while its computational cost is much lower. A higher order PES method has an even higher model accuracy.
We develop a stochastic model for the velocity gradients dynamics along a Lagrangian trajectory. Comparing with different attempts proposed in the literature, the present model, at the cost of introducing a free parameter known in turbulence phenomenology as the intermittency coefficient, gives a realistic picture of velocity gradient statistics at any Reynolds number. To achieve this level of accuracy, we use as a first modelling step a regularized self-stretching term in the framework of the Recent Fluid Deformation (RFD) approximation that was shown to give a realistic picture of small scales statistics of turbulence only up to moderate Reynolds numbers. As a second step, we constrain the dynamics, in the spirit of Girimaji & Pope (1990), in order to impose a peculiar statistical structure to the dissipation seen by the Lagrangian particle. This probabilistic closure uses as a building block a random field that fulfils the statistical description of the intermittency, i.e. multifractal, phenomenon. To do so, we define and generalize to a statistically stationary framework a proposition made by Schmitt (2003). These considerations lead us to propose a non-linear and non-Markovian closed dynamics for the elements of the velocity gradient tensor. We numerically integrate this dynamics and observe that a stationary regime is indeed reached, in which (i) the gradients variance is proportional to the Reynolds number, (ii) gradients are typically correlated over the (small) Kolmogorov time scale and gradients norms over the (large) integral time scale (iii) the joint probability distribution function of the two non vanishing invariants $Q$ and $R$ reproduces the characteristic teardrop shape, (iv) vorticity gets preferentially aligned with the intermediate eigendirection of the deformation tensor and (v) gradients are strongly non-Gaussian and intermittent.
In the study of ocean wave impact on structures, one often uses Froude scaling since the dominant force is gravity. However the presence of trapped or entrained air in the water can significantly modify wave impacts. When air is entrained in water in the form of small bubbles, the acoustic properties in the water change dramatically. While some work has been done to study small-amplitude disturbances in such mixtures, little work has been done on large disturbances in air-water mixtures. We propose a basic two-fluid model in which both fluids share the same velocities and analyze some of its properties. It is shown that this model can successfully mimic water wave impacts on coastal structures. The governing equations are discretized by a second-order finite volume method. Numerical results are presented for two examples: the dam break problem and the drop test problem. It is shown that this basic model can be used to study violent aerated flows, especially by providing fast qualitative estimates.
A shear-improved Smagorinsky model is introduced based on recent results concerning shear effects in wall-bounded turbulence by Toschi et al. (2000). The Smagorinsky eddy-viscosity is modified subtracting the magnitude of the mean shear from the magnitude of the instantaneous resolved strain-rate tensor. This subgrid-scale model is tested in large-eddy simulations of plane-channel flows at two different Reynolds numbers. First comparisons with the dynamic Smagorinsky model and direct numerical simulations, including mean velocity, turbulent kinetic energy and Reynolds stress profiles, are shown to be extremely satisfactory. The proposed model, in addition of being physically sound, has a low computational cost and possesses a high potentiality of generalization to more complex non-homogeneous turbulent flows.
A computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation framework for predicting complex flows is developed on the Tensor Processing Unit (TPU) platform. The TPU architecture is featured with accelerated performance of dense matrix multiplication, large high bandwidth memory, and a fast inter-chip interconnect, which makes it attractive for high-performance scientific computing. The CFD framework solves the variable-density Navier-Stokes equation using a Low-Mach approximation, and the governing equations are discretized by a finite difference method on a collocated structured mesh. It uses the graph-based TensorFlow as the programming paradigm. The accuracy and performance of this framework is studied both numerically and analytically, specifically focusing on effects of TPU-native single precision floating point arithmetic on solution accuracy. The algorithm and implementation are validated with canonical 2D and 3D Taylor Green vortex simulations. To demonstrate the capability for simulating turbulent flows, simulations are conducted for two configurations, namely the decaying homogeneous isotropic turbulence and a turbulent planar jet. Both simulations show good statistical agreement with reference solutions. The performance analysis shows a linear weak scaling and a super-linear strong scaling up to a full TPU v3 pod with 2048 cores.