DNS and LES of 3-D wall-bounded turbulence using Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics

Abstract Smoothed Particle Hydrodynamics (SPH) has been used in the simulation of fluid flows for several years. Recently, SPH saw its range of applications extended to the simulation of real-world engineering applications which often concern the simulation of turbulent three-dimensional flows. However, there is a significant lack in the investigation of such turbulent flows even for simplified applications. Most three-dimensional SPH simulations that analyze properties of a turbulent flow examine the decay of isotropic turbulence, where no solid walls influence the flow. In the present paper several three-dimensional turbulent channel flows are simulated using the SPH method to address this gap in literature. The first set of simulations investigates a quasi direct numerical simulation (DNS) of a channel with reduced size. This enables evaluation of SPH as a pure Navier–Stokes solver by avoiding the introduction of turbulence models. The results show the correct reproduction of the turbulent statistics except for some fluctuations in the near wall region. The second set of simulations attempts a large eddy simulation (LES) of a standard size channel. It is shown that the present SPH formulation fails to reproduce the correct turbulent statistics and the cause for this failure is analyzed with the aide of the Taylor–Green vortex flow and attributed to incorrect reproduction of velocity–pressure interactions by the collocated and large stencil SPH discretisation.