Modeling the 3-d flow around a cylinder using the SAS hybrid model

Three-dimensional calculations were performed to simulate the flow around a cylindrical vegetation element using the Scale Adaptive Simulation (SAS) model; commonly, this is the first step of the modeling of the flow through multiple vegetation elements. SAS solves the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes equations in stable flow regions, while in regions with unstable flow it goes unsteady producing a resolved turbulent spectrum after reducing eddy viscosity according to the locally resolved vortex size represented by the von Karman length scale. A finite volume numerical code was used for the spatial discretisation of the rectangular computational domain with stream-wise, cross-flow and vertical dimensions equal to 30D, 11D and 1D, respectively, which was resolved with unstructured grids. Calculations were compared with experiments and Large Eddy Simulations (LES). Predicted overall flow parameters and mean flow velocities exhibited a very satisfactory agreement with experiments and LES, while the agreement of predicted turbulent stresses was satisfactory. Calculations showed that SAS is an efficient and relatively fast turbulence modeling approach, especially in relevant practical problems, in which the very high accuracy that can be achieved by LES at the expense of large computational times is not required.