Direct numerical simulation of laminar, transitional and turbulent radially inward flow between closely spaced corotating disks

This study describes direct numerical simulation (DNS) of radially inward spiralling corotating disk flow with a narrow disk spacing, using the open source solver Nek5000 and the supercomputer SuperMUC-NG at Leibniz Supercomputing Centre. Knowledge about laminar and turbulent regime boundaries in this flow scenario is important for modelling and performance prediction of friction turbines. Simulations are performed in differently sized sections of the flat annulus that is formed by two opposing corotating disk surfaces. Three sets of operating conditions are covered, from the laminar, transitional and turbulent region of a previously determined stability chart respectively. Directly downstream of the inlet boundary, the flow is artificially perturbed with a random body force acting normal to the disk surfaces. Fourier analysis of the DNS flow field reveals that the artificial perturbation is dampened across all wavenumbers for the laminar conditions, while at the transitional conditions a small range of modes is weakly amplified towards the outlet. The identified unstable modes were previously correctly predicted by linear stability analysis. Comparison to experimental velocity profile measurements from a previous study at the same transitional operating conditions suggests strongly perturbed flow during the experiment. For inflow conditions leading to turbulent flow, average velocity profiles from DNS coincide with those from experiment and from commercial fluid simulation software with turbulence modelling (ANSYS CFX). Close to the walls, turbulent dissipation and turbulent kinetic energy distributions do not agree with the ANSYS CFX results. Friction Reynolds number settles at about 118 after turbulent flow has developed from the initial perturbation. Two point correlations and corresponding energy spectra are presented.