Assessment of a high-order discontinuous Galerkin method for incompressible three-dimensional Navier-Stokes equations: Benchmark results for the flow past a sphere up to Re = 500

With the largest Reynolds number here considered the flow exhibits a complex behavior, even if it still laminar, since undergoes the transition from a regular to an almost chaotic system. For this problem, for which the flow field characteristics are not completely well established and no many data are available in the present literature, detailed results are reported in this paper.