Predicting secondary flows in rotating ducts

A near-wall second-moment closure based on the elliptic relaxation approach has been used to compute fully developed turbulent flow in a rotating square duct. The objective is to explore how faithfully this state-of-the-art closure scheme can reproduce the three-dimensional effects that arise due to the complex interactions between the imposed rotation and the turbulence field. The study constitutes one of the stepping-stones in a series of studies aimed to explore modeling aspects of rotating flows, Quantitative comparisons with recent direct numerical simulations show that the model is able to predict some of the most significant statistical aspects of this complex flow field.