Prediction of wall-pressure fluctuation in turbulent flows with an immersed boundary method

The objective of this paper is to assess the accuracy and efficiency of the immersed boundary (IB) method to predict the wall pressure fluctuations in turbulent flows, where the flow dynamics in the near-wall region is fundamental to correctly predict the overall flow. The present approach achieves sufficient accuracy at the immersed boundary and overcomes deficiencies in previous IB methods by introducing additional constraints – a compatibility for the interpolated velocity boundary condition related to mass conservation and the formal decoupling of the pressure on this surfaces. The immersed boundary-approximated domain method (IB-ADM) developed in the present study satisfies these conditions with an inexpensive computational overhead. The IB-ADM correctly predicts the near-wall velocity, pressure and scalar fields in several example problems, including flows around a very thin solid object for which incorrect results were obtained with previous IB methods. In order to have sufficient near-wall mesh resolution for LES and DNS computations, the present approach uses local mesh refinement. The present method has been also successfully applied to computation of the wall-pressure space–time correlation in DNS of turbulent channel flow on grids not aligned with the boundaries. When applied to a turbulent flow around an airfoil, the computed flow statistics – the mean/RMS flow field and power spectra of the wall pressure – are in good agreement with experiment.