Numerical Simulation of Non-resonant Cavity Flow

This Technology Insertion FY 2007 (TI-07) Capabilities Application Project (CAP) effort focused on the demonstration and validation of an accurate simulation approach for predicting unsteady cavity flows and was accomplished using dedicated resources at the Air Force Research Laboratory (AFRL) and US Army Engineering and Development Center Major Shared Resource Center (ERDC MSRC). Electric Boat Corporationpsilas (EBC) in-house developed hybrid Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes/Large Eddy Simulation (RANS/LES) code was modified to efficiently use a thousand or more processors for cavity simulations with highly-refined numerical geometries (>30 million nodes). These simulations were run for millions of iterations to accumulate simulated flowfield data over a wide range of frequencies and with small bandwidth. Comparisons made between the simulation results and experimental data are described. The comparisons show good agreement between simulated and measured pressure spectra in terms of the cavity fundamental shedding frequency, harmonics of this frequency, and broadband noise. Parallel communication protocols, grid independence studies, and turbulence modeling aspects used in the cavity simulations are also discussed.