Near-the-wall analysis of the NASA Wall-Mounted Hump

Originally proposed during NASA's workshop on CFD Validation of Synthetic Jets and Turbulent Separation Control in 2004, the NASA wall-mounted hump flow features rich physical phenomena, including relaminarization, separation, and reattachment of the boundary layer, despite its relatively simple body geometry. For the past two decades, there have been a fair number of studies that have approached the case with different levels of turbulence modelling complexity, ranging from steady-state RANS to dynamic subgrid-scale modeled LES, assessing their accuracy via a comparison with well-established experimental measures of pressure and skin-friction coefficients as well as velocity and Reynolds stresses profiles. In this context, the present study reports the finest LES solution of the case to date in terms of wall units, leveraging the in-house accelerated CFD code, SOD2D, developed at the Barcelona Supercomputing Center. Rather than focusing on a detailed comparison with experimental data, as has been done typically in the literature, this study focuses on the analysis of the budgets of the near-wall flow mechanisms responsible for the separation and reattachment of the boundary layer, aiming to provide a dataset of results of interest for the turbulence modelling community.