Study of Turbulent Flow Structures of a Practical Steady Engine Head Flow Using Large-Eddy Simulations

Abstract

The prediction performance of two computational fluid dynamics codes is compared to each other and to experimental data of a complex swirling and tumbling flow in a practical complex configuration. This configuration consists of a flow in a production-type heavy-duty diesel engine head with 130-mm cylinder bore. One unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS)-based simulation and two large-eddy simulations (LES) with different inflow conditions have been performed with the KIVA-3V code. Two LES with different resolutions have been performed with the FASTEST-3D code. The parallelization of the this code allows for a more resolved mesh compared to the KIVA-3V code. This kind of simulations gives a complete image of the phenomena that occur in such configurations, and therefore represents a valuable contribution to experimental data. The complex flow structures gives rise to an inhomogeneous turbulence distribution. Such inhomogeneous behavior of the turbulence is well captured by the LES, but naturally damped by the URANS simulation. In the LES, it is confirmed that the inflow conditions play a decisive role for all main flow features. When no particular treatment of the flow through the runners can be made, the best results are achieved by computing a large part of the upstream region, once performed with the FASTEST-3D code. If the inflow conditions are tuned, all main complex flow structures are also recovered by KIVA-3V. The application of upwinding schemes in both codes is in this respect not crucial.