Fluid mechanics and turbulence modelling

Researchers from the School of Mathematical Sciences at the University of Adelaide are using eResearch SA's facilities to explore fluid mechanics and undertake sophisticated turbulence modelling.

Turbulence is characterised by unsteady three-dimensional fluid motion over a wide range of spatial and temporal scales. It is a fundamental problem in many fields, including astrophysics, oceanography, meteorology, combustion, aeronautics and engineering.

The equations governing turbulent flow have been known for over a century, however there is no known general solution. Instead, computers can be used to obtain approximate solutions. The problem is that in most cases of practical interest, the range of scales is so enormous that the computational problem cannot be solved on even the largest supercomputers. Therefore, simplified models are needed.

The goal of the researchers is to produce tractable models capable of reliably predicting turbulent flows. This involves the use of both state-of-the-art turbulence models and large-scale computational resources.

eResearch SA's supercomputer Corvus is being used to run code for this research project—the scale of the calculations is such that they could not be run on ordinary machines.

The image to the right is a visualisation of a turbulent mixing layer—the flow formed between two streams of different velocity. The image shows the mixed fluid only, coloured according to composition.