Transition Modelling for Turbomachinery Flows

In the past few decades a significant amount of progress has been made in the development of reliable turbulence models that can accurately simulate a wide range of fully turbulent engineering flows. The efforts by different groups have resulted in a spectrum of models that can be used in many different applications, while balancing the accuracy requirements and the computational resources available to a CFD user. However, the important effect of laminar-turbulent transition is not included in the majority of today’s engineering CFD simulations. The reason for this is that transition modelling does not offer the same wide spectrum of CFD-compatible model formulations that is currently available for turbulent flows, even though a large body of publications is available on the subject. There are several reasons for this unsatisfactory situation.