Evaluation of PANS Methodology With Nonlinear Eddy Viscosity Closure: Flow Past a Heated Sphere

Abstract

Abstract The partially averaged Navier–Stokes (PANS) approach has emerged as a viable scale-resolving bridging method over the last decade. Conventional PANS method, based on the linear eddy viscosity closure, overcomes the scale-resolving inadequacies of Reynolds-averaging but still suffers from limitations arising from linear constitutive modeling of turbulent stresses. Linear PANS has been evaluated in a variety of complex flow fields, including the benchmark case of flow around a sphere. In this work, the authors assess the potential of nonlinear eddy viscosity closure and further extend the evaluation of nonlinear closure in predicting thermal characteristics (besides hydrodynamics) of flow past a sphere. The presented evaluation has been performed on the basis of various surface-related and wake-related quantities. Our results are compared against available experimental and direct numerical simulation (DNS)/large eddy simulation studies. Our study shows that for the same value of the filter-control parameters, nonlinear PANS performs significantly better than linear PANS.