Effect of the Gauss-Legendre node distribution on wall turbulence in Direct Numerical Simulations of periodic channel flows using a Discontinuous Galerkin method flow solver

High-order (HO) methods in Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) are becoming increasingly popular. This is partly because of their higher accuracy for a given number of degrees of freedom but also due to an increased interest in the scale-resolving simulations of flows in complex geometries enabled by today’s computers. These HO methods are also particularly well suited for their implementation on Graphic Processor Units (GPU) increasing the range of flow complexity that can be solved.

HO methods are generally based on the Finite Element Method (FEM) which requires the definition of points internal to the element to achieve high orders. The choice of node distribution leads to different numerical schemes with different properties.

In this work we analyze the effect of the node distributions over the development of the boundary layer. We do this by simulations of the periodic channel flow with different distributions.

This material is based upon work supported by the Department of Energy, National Nuclear Security Administration under Award Number DE-NA0003969