Modeling of turbulent separated flows using OpenFOAM

Turbulent separated planar bluff-body flows were numerically analyzed using the state-of-the-art OpenFOAM and ANSYS FLUENT technologies, based on the conventional URANS approach. Several popular in fluid dynamics test problems such as laminar and turbulent flows over a circular cylinder and turbulent fully developed flows over a triangular cylinder in a channel were numerically replicated with the goal of validation of the selected numerical methods. The detailed, face-to-face comparison between OpenFOAM, FLUENT and experimental data was discussed. Parallel performance in the terms of a strong and weak scalability was assessed up to 1024 cores and compared as well. In general, the present results demonstrated minimum deviations between OpenFOAM and FLUENT and agreed fairly well with the experimental data and other numerical solutions. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.