Direct Numerical Simulation of Flow Over a Wall-Mounted Cube with the Nek5000 Spectral Element Code: DNS at Re h = 3900
The direct numerical simulation (DNS) of the canonical wall-mounted unit cube subjected to two distinct incident velocity profiles is performed at a Reynolds number where the bulk flow characteristics are known to become relatively Reynolds number insensitive. The aim of this work is to highlight the sensitivity of such bluff-body flows to mean shear and to provide a representative set of data for such flow scenarios where common turbulence modeling techniques often fail. Simple boundary conditions and a small domain are selected to allow for cost-effective and easy comparisons for model development purposes. In addition to mean velocity profiles, select turbulence statistics are presented in detail. Further, the basic efficacy of eddy viscosity models is evaluated and found to be adequate only for the shear stress components for the bluff-body flows examined here. Other failure mechanisms for RANS are proposed.