Turbulence bounded by curved walls characterizes different applications of paramount importance for engineering applications: highly cambered airfoils, turbomachine blades and coolant channels among others.
An archetypal configuration to study these problems is the flow in a curved channel, whose geometry is defined by a concave and convex wall: the curved channel enables to study the effects of both convex and concave curvature on turbulence.
Although pressure-driven flows in straight channels have been investigated widely enough to have a fundamental understanding of the near-wall turbulence, scaling laws cannot be directly transferred to curved channels.
Experiments conducted so far on curved channel flows, while highlighting the striking effect of curvature on turbulence, have not been able to provide an adequate understanding of the flow.
Direct Numerical Simulation (DNS) is the appropriate tool to investigate the complex flow physics driven by curvature.
The project team believes that this topic of fundamental importance from both a theoretical and application perspective has never received sufficient attention. Through this project based on the analysis of a large DNS database the study aims to fill this gap.
Paolo Orlandi, Sapienza Università di Roma - Italy