A numerical strategy to combine high-order schemes, complex geometry and parallel computing for high resolution DNS of fractal generated turbulence

Impressive advances in parallel platform architectures over the past decade have made Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) a powerful tool which can provide full access to the spatial structure of turbulent flows with complex geometries. An innovative approach which combines high-order schemes and a dual domain decomposition method is presented in this paper and is applied to DNS of multiscale-generated turbulent flows by a fractal grid. These DNS illustrate the applicability of our approach to the simulation of complex turbulent flows and provide results which are compared with recent laboratory experiments thus providing new insights for the interpretation of the experimental measurements.