High order conservative finite difference scheme for variable density low Mach number turbulent flows

The high order conservative finite difference scheme of Morinishi et al. [Y. Morinishi, O.V. Vasilyev, T. Ogi, Fully conservative finite difference scheme in cylindrical coordinates for incompressible flow simulations, J. Comput. Phys. 197 (2004) 686] is extended to simulate variable density flows in complex geometries with cylindrical or cartesian non-uniform meshes. The formulation discretely conserves mass, momentum, and kinetic energy in a periodic domain. In the presence of walls, boundary conditions that ensure primary conservation have been derived, while secondary conservation is shown to remain satisfactory. In the case of cylindrical coordinates, it is desirable to increase the order of accuracy of the convective term in the radial direction, where most gradients are often found. A straightforward centerline treatment is employed, leading to good accuracy as well as satisfactory robustness. A similar strategy is introduced to increase the order of accuracy of the viscous terms. The overall numerical scheme obtained is highly suitable for the simulation of reactive turbulent flows in realistic geometries, for it combines arbitrarily high order of accuracy, discrete conservation of mass, momentum, and energy with consistent boundary conditions. This numerical methodology is used to simulate a series of canonical turbulent flows ranging from isotropic turbulence to a variable density round jet. Both direct numerical simulation (DNS) and large eddy simulation (LES) results are presented. It is observed that higher order spatial accuracy can improve significantly the quality of the results. The error to cost ratio is analyzed in details for a few cases. The results suggest that high order schemes can be more computationally efficient than low order schemes.