Design of implicit high-order filters on unstructured grids for the identification of large-scale features in large-eddy simulation and application to a swirl burner

The analysis of large-scale structures from highly refined unsteady simulations becomes challenging as the mesh resolution increases, and some new tools must be developed in order to perform their identification and extraction. A solution is to use filters to remove the smallest flow motions. High-order filters, characterized by their good selectivity properties, were implemented in an unstructured finite-volume solver for large-eddy simulation, and their ability to extract structures of a given scale was tested on canonical flows. Then, these filters were applied on an aeronautical swirl burner with a complex geometry. The results show that novel high-order filters are able to extract the precessing vortex core from this realistic turbulent flow. High-order filtering enables to study in detail this large-scale structure and to gain insight into the dynamic of swirl flows. (C) 2015 AIP Publishing LLC.