Prediction of the pressure distribution on a cubical building with implicit LES

This paper presents a numerical study of the flow around a cubical building in an atmospheric boundary layer. The Reynolds number of the flow is Re=4×106. Different types of turbulence models, steady state RANS, hybrid RANS/LES and LES, are used and the simulation results are compared to field measurement data of the mean pressure distribution. The objective is to build an approach to perform simulations on coarse grids with low computational cost. The outcome is that the Implicit LES (ILES) method is the most accurate for coarse grid simulations. In order to verify the sensitivity of the results to the Reynolds number, also simulations of a wind tunnel experiment at Reynolds number 4×104 are performed. We demonstrate that also for lower Reynolds numbers, although not optimal, the ILES approach leads to quite good results.