Influence of the spatial resolution on fine-scale features in DNS of turbulence generated by a single square grid

Abstract

We focus in this paper on the effect of the resolution of direct numerical simulations (DNS) on the spatio-temporal development of the turbulence downstream of a single square grid. The aims of this study are to validate our numerical approach by comparing experimental and numerical one-point statistics downstream of a single square grid and then investigate how the resolution is impacting the dynamics of the flow. In particular, using the Q–R diagram, we focus on the interaction between the strain-rate and rotation tensors, the symmetric and skew-symmetric parts of the velocity gradient tensor, respectively. We first show good agreement between our simulations and hot-wire experiment for one-point statistics on the centreline of the single square grid. Then, by analysing the shape of the Q–R diagram for various streamwise locations, we evaluate the ability of under-resolved DNS to capture the main features of the turbulence downstream of the single square grid.