Scientific Computing Group Seminars - Detail View

Speaker: R. Bouffanais

Affiliation: MIT

Talk Title: Unsteady transitional swirling flow in presence of a moving free surface

Invited by: George Karniadakis

Time: May 08 2009 11 a.m.

Location: 182 George Street, Room 110

Abstract:

Unsteady incompressible viscous flows of a fluid enclosed in a cylindrical container with an open top surface are discussed. These moving free-surface flows are generated by the steady rotation of the solid bottom end-wall. Such type of flows belongs to a group of recirculating lid-driven cavity flows with geometrical axisymmetry. The top surface of the cylindrical cavity is left open so that the free surface can freely deformed. The Reynolds regime corresponds to unsteady transitional flows with some incursions in the fully laminar regime. The approach taken here revealed new nonaxisymmetric flow states that are investigated based on a fully three-dimensional solution of the Navier-Stokes equations for the free-surface cylindrical swirling flow, without resorting to any symmetry property unlike all other results available in the literature. Theses solutions are obtained through direct numerical simulations based on a highly-accurate Legendre spectral element method combined with a moving-grid technique.