Simulation adaptative des grandes échelles d'écoulements turbulents fondée sur une méthode Galerkine discontinue. (Adaptive Large Eddy Simulations based on discontinuous Galerkin methods)

The main goal of this work is to improve the accuracy and computational efficiency of Large Eddy Simulations (LES) by means of discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods. To this end, two main research topics have been investigated: resolution adaptation strategies and LES models for high-order methods.As regards the first topic, in the framework of DG methods the spatial resolution can be efficiently adapted by modifying either the local mesh size (h-adaptation) or the degree of the polynomial representation of the solution (p-adaptation).The automatic resolution adaptation requires the definition of an error estimation strategy to analyse the local solution quality and resolution requirements.The efficiency of several strategies derived from the literature are compared by performing p- and h-adaptive simulations. Based on this comparative study a suitable error indicator for the adaptive scale-resolving simulations is selected.Both static and dynamic p-adaptive algorithms for the simulation of unsteady flows are then developed and analysed. It is demonstrated by numerical simulations that the proposed algorithms can provide a reduction of the computational cost for the simulation of both transient and statistically steady flows.A novel error estimation strategy is then introduced. It is local, requiring only information from the element and direct neighbours, and can be computed at run-time with limited overhead. It is shown that the static p-adaptive algorithm based on this error estimator can be employed to improve the accuracy for LES of statistically steady turbulent flows.As regards the second topic, a novel framework consistent with the DG discretization is developed for the a-priori analysis of DG-LES models from DNS databases. It allows to identify the ideal energy transfer mechanism between resolved and unresolved scales.This approach is applied for the analysis of the DG Variational Multiscale (VMS) approach. It is shown that, for fine resolutions, the DG-VMS approach is able to replicate the ideal energy transfer mechanism.However, for coarse resolutions, typical of LES at high Reynolds numbers, a more accurate agreement is obtained by a mixed Smagorinsky-VMS model.