Application of immersed boundary based turbulence wall modeling to the Ahmed body aerodynamics

This paper applies a recently developed immersed boundary-turbulence wall modeling approach to turbulent flows over a generic car geometry, known as the Ahmed body, under massive flow separation within a lattice Boltzmann solver. Although the immersed boundary method combined with hierarchical Cartesian grid offers high flexibility in automatic grid generation around complex geometries, the near-wall solution is significantly deteriorated compared to the body-fitted simulation, especially when coupled to wall models for turbulent flows at high Reynolds number. Enhanced wall treatments have been proposed in the literature and validated for attached flow configurations. In this work, the Ahmed body with a slant surface of angle 35 degrees is considered where the flow separates massively over the slant surface and the vertical base. The large eddy simulation is performed with a Reynolds stress constraint near-wall. The eddy viscosity is computed dynamically by taking into account the actually resolved Reynolds stresses. It approaches the mixing length eddy viscosity in attached boundary layers and returns to the subgrid eddy viscosity in detached boundary layers. An explicit equilibrium wall model has also been proposed to accelerate the calculation. Comparison with the no-slip boundary condition on the separated surfaces shows that the near-wall treatments with the equilibrium wall model operate reasonably well on both attached and detached boundary layers. Published under an exclusive license by AIP Publishing.