Simulation of turbulent thermal convection in complicated domains

To simulate turbulent flows in complicated enclosed three-dimensional domains a fast finite-volume high-order method is developed. In principle, the method is based on the Chorin-Temam scheme. The Poisson solver, which is applied to compute the pressure, uses the separation of variables together with capacitance matrix technique. The developed numerical method generally allows to use hexahedral computational meshes, which are non-equidistant in all three directions and non-regular in any two directions. The method was successfully used in three-dimensional Direct Numerical Simulations of turbulent high-Rayleigh-number thermal convection in cylindrical and parallelepiped domains with obstacles. (c) 2008 Elsevier B.V. All rights reserved