Scientists at the University of Stuttgart’s Institute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics (IAG) have produced a novel dataset that will improve the development of turbulence models. With the help of the Hawk supercomputer at the High-Performance Computing Center Stuttgart (HLRS), investigators in the laboratory of Dr. Christoph Wenzel conducted a large-scale direct numerical simulation of a spatially evolving turbulent boundary layer.

Using more than 100 million CPU hours on Hawk, the simulation is unique in that it captures the onset of a canonical, fully-developed turbulent state in a single computational domain. The study also identified with unprecedented clarity an inflection point at which the outer region of the turbulent boundary layer begins to maintain a self-similar structure as it moves toward high Reynolds numbers. The results appear in a new paper published in the Journal of Fluid Mechanics.

“Our team’s goal is to understand unexplored parameter regimes in turbulent boundary layers,” said Jason Appelbaum, a Ph.D. candidate in the Wenzel Lab and leader of this research. “By running a large-scale simulation that fully resolves the entire development of turbulence from an early to an evolved state, we have generated the first reliable, full-resolution dataset for investigating how high-Reynolds-number effects emerge.”