Compressible flow | EPFL Graph Search

Compressible flow (or gas dynamics) is the branch of fluid mechanics that deals with flows having significant changes in fluid density. While all flows are compressible, flows are usually treated as being incompressible when the Mach number (the ratio of the speed of the flow to the speed of sound) is smaller than 0.3 (since the density change due to velocity is about 5% in that case). The study of compressible flow is relevant to high-speed aircraft, jet engines, rocket motors, high-speed entry into a planetary atmosphere, gas pipelines, commercial applications such as abrasive blasting, and many other fields. History The study of gas dynamics is often associated with the flight of modern high-speed aircraft and atmospheric reentry of space-exploration vehicles; however, its origins lie with simpler machines. At the beginning of the 19th century, investigation into the behaviour of fired bullets led to improvement in the accuracy and capabilities of guns and artillery. As th

Simulation of benchmark and industrial unsteady compressible turbulent fluid flows

Michele Mossi

Large-eddy simulation (LES) is a very promising technique for the numerical computation of unsteady turbulent flows, and seems to be the perfect tool to simulate the compressible air flow around a high-speed train in a tunnel, providing unsteady results for aerodynamic and aeroacoustic analysis. To look into this possible future application of LES, two major lines of investigation are pursued in this thesis: first, the study of the effective ability of shock-capturing schemes to predict fundamental turbulent phenomena; second, the analysis of the aerodynamic phenomena induced by a high-speed train in a tunnel. The numerical simulation of compressible flows requires the use of shock-capturing schemes. These schemes can be relatively dissipative and mask the subgrid-scale contribution introduced in a large-eddy simulation to account for the unresolved turbulence scales. To estimate their effective dissipation and their ability to resolve turbulence phenomena, shock-capturing schemes widely used for aeronautical applications, from second- to fifth-order space accuracy, are employed here for simulating well-known fundamental flows in subsonic and supersonic regimes. Direct and large-eddy numerical simulations are undertaken for the inviscid and viscous Taylor-Green vortex decay problem, the freely decaying homogeneous and isotropic turbulence, and the fully developed channel flow. For all the turbulent flows investigated, several turbulence statistics are computed and the numerical dissipation of the schemes tested is interpreted in terms of subgrid-scale dissipation in a LES context, yielding an equivalent Smagorinsky or dynamic coefficient. This coefficient is for all schemes of the same order of magnitude as the commonly accepted values in LES for the subgrid-scale term. On the grounds of this analysis and of the comparisons of the turbulence statistics with accurate data obtained in the literature, the addition of explicit subgrid-scale models to the shock-capturing schemes tested is not recommended. It is thus concluded that the use of the LES technique for compressible turbulent flows is not yet suitable for industrial applications. The aerodynamic phenomena generated by a high-speed train travelling in a tunnel are also discussed, their importance on the design of high-speed lies is pointed out, and the analysis tools commonly employed for their study are reviewed. To study numerically the three-dimensional, compressible and turbulent air flow around a high-speed train accelerating in a tunnel, by accounting for the unsteady effects at inlet and outlet boundaries due to the propagation of pressure waves generated at the train departure, new coupling conditions between one-dimensional and three-dimensional domains are developed. These conditions are applied successfully to the numerical simulation of the unsteady wake developing behind two- and three-dimensional vehicles, where the averaged Navier-Stokes equations are solved with the turbulence modelling approach. The influence on the wake of the length of the vehicle tail is also discussed and results of multi-dimensional simulations are compared with one-dimensional data.

EPFL1999

Experimental Contribution to the Mechanics of Herringbone Grooved Journal Air Bearings

Ivan Ognjanovic

Gas Lubricated Herringbone Grooved Journal Bearings (HGJB) have long been used in equipment such as navigation systems, optical scanners for laser printers and high speed cameras and disk spindle for flyhead testers. All such applications are characterized by a relatively small size (journal diameter

EPFL2011

Algorithmes d'adaptation de maillages anisotropes et application à l'aérodynamique

Wissam Hassan

The goal of this thesis is to study an anisotropic adaptive algorithm for transonic compressible viscous flow around an airwing. A convection-diffusion model problem is considered, an anisotropic a posteriori error estimator for the H1 semi-norm of the error is derived. The equivalence between the error and the estimator is proved, which provides the efficiency and the reliability of this estimator. A goal oriented anisotropic a posteriori error estimator is introduced. The equivalence with the error is not proved but lower and upper bounds are obtained. Based on this error estimator, an anisotropic mesh algorithm is proposed and applied to the transonic compressible flow around an airwing. The mesh is structured close to the boundary layer and is kept as is, while the mesh outside the boundary layer is adapted according to the anisotropic error estimator. This anisotropic adaptive algorithm allows shocks to be captured accurately, while keeping the number of vertices as low as possible.

EPFL2012

Simulation of benchmark and industrial unsteady compressible turbulent fluid flows

Michele Mossi

EPFL1999