Role of Continuity in Residual-Based Variational Multiscale Modeling of Turbulence

摘要

This paper examines the role of continuity of the basis in the computation of turbulent flows. We compare standard finite elements and NURBS (non-uniform rational B-splines) discretizations that are employed in Isogeometric Analysis. We make use of quadratic discretizations that are C0- continuous across element boundaries in standard finite elements, and C1- continuous in the case of NURBS. The variational multiscale residual-based method is employed as a turbulence modeling technique. We find that C1- continuous discretizations outperform their C0-continuous counterparts on a per- degree-of- freedom basis. We also find that the effect of continuity is greater for higher Reynolds number flows.