Comparison of a spectral method with volume penalization and a finite volume method with body fitted grids for turbulent flows

We consider a turbulent flow past periodic hills at Reynolds number 1400 and compare two numerical methods: A Fourier pseudo-spectral scheme with volume penalization to model the no-slip boundary conditions and a finite volume method with body fitted grids. A detailed comparison of the results is presented for mean velocity profiles and Reynolds stress and confronted with those obtained by Breuer et al., [1]. In addition higher order statistics are performed and their scale-dependence is analyzed using orthogonal wavelets. Moreover, for the Fourier pseudo-spectral scheme, the influence of the Reynolds number is investigated.