A production limiter study of SST-SAS turbulence model for bluff body flows

Aim at avoiding the issue of energy anomaly near the stagnation point in bluff body flows, a new reformulated production limiter considering the efforts of strain rate tensor and rotation tensor is proposed for the Scale-Adaptive Simulation method (SAS). Meanwhile, two other limiters only considering strain or vorticity are also conducted for comparison. The concrete mechanism and capabilities of different limiters in adjusting the turbulent energy are carefully tested through the typical circular cylinder flow at the subcritical Reynolds number 3 900 and 1.4 × 105. As for the validation, detailed numerical comparisons with the relevant experimental data are presented. The numerical results show that, with the recommended production limiter, the issue of spurious energy generation is effectively remedied and the turbulent viscosity is reduced to an appropriate level in the wake region, the concerned flow qualities such as recirculation length, velocity profiles and integral parameters are in excellent agreement with the measurements benefiting from the attractive representation of the shear layers. Moreover, the prediction of high order Reynolds stress is also comparable with that of some DES and LES outputs. In general, the well established production limiter is available for the development of SAS and other hybrid SST formulations.