Computation of turbulent flow in a lid-driven 2D cavity and a 3D box using a number of turbulence models

In this paper, various turbulence models are used for simulating internal turbulent flow with large recirculation by considering the flow in a 2-D lid-driven square cavity and a 3-D lid driven cubic box. The accuracy of the newly developed Wray-Agarwal (WA) one equation turbulence model is compared against the two well-known industry standard turbulence models - the Spalart-Allmaras (SA) model and the Shear-Stress-Transport (SST) k-ω model. The simulations are performed by numerically solving the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations in conjunction with WA, SA and SST k-ω models and comparing the results with the available experimental data and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) results. 2-D numerical solutions are obtained at Reynolds numbers of 10,000, 20,000, 50,000, and 100,000. 3-D numerical solutions are obtained at Reynolds numbers of 3200 and 10,000. All numerical calculation are compared with other numerical results available in the literature. The open-source CFD code OpenFOAM is used to compute the flow field. Computational results clearly demonstrate that the Wray-Agarwal model outperforms in accuracy both the Spalart-Allmaras and Shear-Stress-Transport k-ω models at all Reynolds numbers considered.