Constrained large-eddy simulation of separated flow in a channel with streamwise-periodic constrictions

Constrained large-eddy simulation (CLES) method has been recently developed by Chen and his colleagues for simulating attached and detached wall-bounded turbulent flows. In CLES, the whole domain is simulated using large-eddy simulation (LES) while a Reynolds stress constraint is enforced on the subgrid-scale (SGS) stress model for near wall regions. In this paper, CLES is used to simulate the separated flow in a channel with streamwise-periodic constrictions at Re = 10,595. The results of CLES are compared with those of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) method, LES, detached eddy simulation (DES) and previous LES results by Breuer et al. and Ziefle et al. Although a coarse grid is used, our results from the present LES, DES and CLES do not show large deviations from the reference results using much finer grid resolution. The comparison also shows that CLES performs the best among different turbulence models tested, demonstrating that the CLES provides an excellent alternative model for separated flows. Furthermore, the cross-comparisons among different CLES implementations have been carried out. Our simulation results are in favor of using the constraint from algebraic RANS model or solving the RANS model equations in the whole domain with a length scale modification according to the idea from DES.