Improving shock-free compressible RANS solvers for LES on unstructured meshes

Standard numerical methods used to solve the Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes equations are known to be too dissipative to carry out large eddy simulations since the artificial dissipation they introduce to stabilize the discretization of the convection term usually interacts strongly with the subgrid scale model. A possible solution is to resort to non-dissipative central schemes. Unfortunately, these schemes are in general unstable. A way to reach stability is to select a central scheme that conserves the discrete kinetic energy. To that purpose, a family of kinetic energy conserving schemes is developed to perform simulations of compressible shock-free flows on unstructured grids. A direct numerical simulation of the flow past a sphere at a Reynolds number of 300 and a large eddy simulation at a Reynolds number of 10,000 are performed to validate the methodology.