Author: Guillaume Balarac
Turbulent flows are characterized by a large range of scales of coherent vortices. This property allows to improve the mixing of a tracer (dye, pollutant, temperature…) in the flow. Depending of the tracer properties, the mixing can be developed at scales smaller than the smallest scales of the fluid motion. In numerical simulation studies, the classical methods lead to too strong constraints to allow an explicit simulation of all the range of scales on the supercomputers.
In collaboration with J.-B. Lagaert et G.-H. Cottet (LJK, Grenoble), new numerical approach has been proposed. It allows a complete description of the turbulent mixing even in configurations where the mixing scales are strongly smaller than the motion scales (ref : J.B. Lagaert, G. Balarac et G.-H. Cottet, J. Comp. Physics, 2014.