Numerical Study of Different Closure Approaches for Prediction of Forced Convective Turbulent Cylindrical Cavity Flows

The present work exhibits a numerical study comparing the fluid dynamic and thermal fields of turbulent, three-dimensional forced convective cylindrical cavity flows obtained with Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Reynolds-Averaged Navier Stokes (RANS). In the latter approach, three different closure models are employed: Reynolds Stress Model (RSM), standard k – e and standard k - ω. It is considered a three-dimensional, incompressible, turbulent fluid flow at the steady state with ReD = 22,000 and Pr = 0.71. The main purpose is to investigate whether discrepancies are noticed in time-averaged and statistics of turbulent flows between LES and RANS predictions. Differences in time-averaged and statistical fields can be important for evaluation of convective fluxes in turbulent flows and combined convective and radiative transfer in participant media, i.e., for study of Turbulence-Radiation Interactions (TRI). The spatially-filtered and time-averaged conservation equations of mass, momentum and energy are solved with the Finite Volume Method (FVM). Results showed that time-averaged and RMS thermal fields obtained with LES and RANS presented reasonable discrepancies in regions near the cavity surfaces, which affects the convective fluxes in this region. For the highest temperature region of the cavity (near its inlet) the predictions obtained with LES and RANS are similar, which can led to similar predictions in heat exchange when thermal radiation is taken into account in optically thin participant media. For optically thick media, where local differences increase their importance, the employment of RANS is not recommended.