Application of a fractional-step scheme and finite-volume method for simulating flow past a surface-mounted mixing tab

The fractional-step scheme and finite-volume method are applied on a structured body-fitted grid to simulate the flow passing over a trapezoidal tab mounted on a flat plate. The implementation of boundary conditions on tab surfaces is greatly simplified with this grid system. Due to grid nonorthogonality, however, discretization of Navier-Stokes equations leads to linear systems with complicated coecient matrices. For the problem size in this work, performance data indicate that parallel operations occupy about 98.38% of the simulation, giving rise to a maximum parallel speedup of S_p.max ≈ 61.73. The flow assign over the trapezoidal tab is simulated at a Reynolds number Re = 600 based on the inlet free-stream velocity and the tab height, and the results are compared with a particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurement with the same parameters. The simulation successfully captures the vortex structures in the tab wake as observed in the experiments. Comparisons of the instantaneous flow patterns, the mean velocity, and second-order moments also show good agreement. The simulation and PIV experiment also produce a similar shear-stress distribution along the streamwise direction at the flat plate.