Wall Treatment for LES

The wall treatment for Large Eddy Simulation (LES) provides boundary conditions to the solvers for flow and energy that are specific to turbulent boundary layers.

For LES, the streaky structures that develop in the near-wall region require adequate mesh definition in spanwise and streamwise direction. Therefore, it may be desirable to avoid having to resolve the viscous sublayer. To facilitate this choice, the following wall treatments are available:

  • Low-y+
  • All-y+

An LES wall treatment performs the following functions:

Wall Shear Stress

Simcenter STAR-CCM+ calculates the wall shear stress according to Eqn. (1626), where the friction velocity uτ is computed depending on the wall treatment as:

Wall Treatment uτ
Low-y+
Figure 1. EQUATION_DISPLAY
uτ=μ|v˜tangential|ρd
(1637)

where:

  • μ is the dynamic viscosity.
  • v˜tangential is the LES filtered wall-tangential velocity vector.
  • ρ is the density.
  • d the distance of the centroid of the near-wall cell to the wall.
All-y+
Figure 2. EQUATION_DISPLAY
uτ=u*
(1638)

where the velocity scale u * is calculated iteratively by equating the computed value of u + given by Eqn. (1585) with the wall-function definition for u + as given by Eqn. (1599).

The wall shear stress is usually calculated using the velocity at the cell adjacent to the wall. However, using this cell as reference cell for wall-modeled large eddy simulations (WMLES) can lead to an underestimation of the wall shear stress (also called log-layer mismatch). To reduce this effect, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ uses the second cell away from the wall as reference cell by default.

Wall Heat Flux

For the low-y+ wall treatment, the wall heat flux is calculated as for laminar flow, see Eqn. (1628). For the all-y+ wall treatment, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ calculates the wall heat flux as given by Eqn. (1629), where u* is calculated iteratively and T^c+ is calculated based on Kader's law (see Eqn. (1606)).

Model Coefficients

The all- y + wall treatment uses the following model coefficients:
κ E
0.42 9