Title: Benchmark computations of 3D laminar flow around a cylinder with CFX, OpenFOAM and FeatFlow

Authors: Evren Bayraktar; Otto Mierka; Stefan Turek

Addresses: Institute of Applied Mathematics (LS III), TU Dortmund, Vogelpothsweg 87, D-44227, Dortmund, Germany. ' Institute of Applied Mathematics (LS III), TU Dortmund, Vogelpothsweg 87, D-44227, Dortmund, Germany. ' Institute of Applied Mathematics (LS III), TU Dortmund, Vogelpothsweg 87, D-44227, Dortmund, Germany

Abstract: Numerically challenging, comprehensive benchmark cases are of great importance for researchers in the field of CFD. Numerical benchmark cases offer researchers frameworks to quantitatively explore limits of the computational tools and to validate them. Therefore, we focus on simulations of challenging benchmark tests, laminar and transient 3D flows around a cylinder, and aim to establish a new comprehensive benchmark case by doing direct numerical simulations with three distinct CFD software packages, OpenFOAM, Ansys-CFX and FeatFlow which employ different numerical approaches to the discretisation of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations. All the software tools successfully pass the benchmark tests and show a good agreement such that the benchmark result was precisely determined. As a main result, the CFD software package with high order finite element approximation has been found to be computationally more efficient and accurate than the ones adopting low order space discretisation methods.

Keywords: laminar incompressible flow; flow around cylinder; benchmarking; finite element method; FEM; flow solvers; computational science; 3D laminar flow; CFD; computational fluid dynamics; direct numerical simulation; modelling.

DOI: 10.1504/IJCSE.2012.048245

International Journal of Computational Science and Engineering, 2012 Vol.7 No.3, pp.253 - 266

Received: 24 Oct 2011
Accepted: 26 Feb 2012
Published online: 22 Sep 2014 *

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