Accurate flow prediction of wakes and vortex-dominated flows is essential to a wide range of applications, including aircraft, rotorcraft, dynamic interface, bio-inspired unsteady flight and propulsion, wind turbines, and urban flows. While current computational fluid dynamics software can model the complete flow field and wake system, predicting high Reynolds number turbulent flows around realistic geometries is time consuming and computationally expensive. Prior work has demonstrated that by adopting a vorticity-velocity formulation in a grid-based flow solver (VorTran-M2) one can lower the cost of predicting convection-driven vorticity dominated flows by several orders of magnitude when compared to conventional formulations. This paper describes the further development and extension of VorTran-M2 to turbulent flows, and the benchmarking of the flow solver for applications involving strong stretching and diffusion processes, which are core drivers of turbulent flow evolution. Results indicate that the types of computational cost savings seen previously for inviscid and convection dominate problems also apply to turbulent flow simulations.
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