Turbulent Couette–Taylor flows with endwall effects: A numerical benchmark

• This is the first DNS study of the turbulent flow in a Taylor–Couette system using a multidomain decomposition technique.
• Numerical benchmark of LES and RANS models in a rotating system.
• Turbulent angular momentum scales as the Reynolds number to the power 1.9 using DNS.

The accurate prediction of fluid flow within rotating systems has a primary role for the reliability and performance of rotating machineries. The selection of a suitable model to account for the effects of turbulence on such complex flows remains an open issue in the literature. This paper reports a numerical benchmark of different approaches available within commercial CFD solvers together with results obtained by means of in-house developed or open-source available research codes exploiting a suitable Reynolds Stress Model (RSM) closure, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and a direct numerical simulation (DNS). The predictions are compared to the experimental data of Burin et al. (2010) in an original enclosed Couette–Taylor apparatus with endcap rings. The results are discussed in details for both the mean and turbulent fields. A particular attention has been turned to the scaling of the turbulent angular momentum G with the Reynolds number Re. By DNS, G is found to be proportional to Reα, the exponent α = 1.9 being constant in our case for the whole range of Reynolds numbers. Most of the approaches predict quite well the good trends apart from the k–ω SST model, which provides relatively poor agreement with the experiments even for the mean tangential velocity profile. Among the RANS models, even though no approach appears to be fully satisfactory, the RSM closure offers the best overall agreement.