Development of various rotation and curvature corrections for eddy-viscosity turbulence models

The goal of this paper is to enable the eddy-viscosity type turbulence models to accurately account for the rotation and curvature (RC) effects. To date, there have been two approaches for inclusion of rotation and curvature effects in turbulence models, which can be categorized as the “Modified Coefficients Approach” which parameterizes the model coefficients such that the growth rate of turbulent kinetic energy is either suppressed or enhanced depending upon the effect of RC on the pressure gradient in the flow and the “Bifurcation Approach” which parameterizes the eddy-viscosity coefficient such that the equilibrium solution bifurcates from the main branch to decaying solution branches. Both of these approaches are applied to the widely used turbulence models (SA, SST k-ω and WA) and they show some improvement in predictions of turbulent flow in all benchmark test cases considered, namely the flow in a 2D curved duct, flow in a 2D U-turn duct, fully developed turbulent flow in a 2D rotating channel, fully developed turbulent flow in a 2D rotating backward-facing step, flow in a rotating cavity, flow in a stationary and rotating serpentine channel, flow in a rotor-stator cavity and in a hydrocyclone. All the simulations are conducted using the commercial software ANSYS Fluent and the open source CFD software OpenFOAM. The results of this research should enhance the ability of the RANS modeling for more accurate prediction of complex turbulent flows with rotation and curvature effects.