Convergent-Divergent (C-D) nozzles are used in rocket engines to produce thrust as a reaction to the acceleration of hot combustion chamber gases in the opposite direction. To maximize the engine performance at high altitudes, large area ratio, bell-shaped or contoured nozzles are used. At lower altitudes, the exit pressure of these nozzles is lower than the ambient pressure. During this over-expanded condition, the nozzle-internal flow adapts to the ambient pressure through an oblique shock. But the boundary layer inside the divergent portion of the nozzle is unable to withstand the pressure rise associated with the shock, and consequently flow separation is induced. Numerical simulation of separated flows in rocket nozzles is challenging because the existing turbulence models are unable to correctly predict shock-induced flow separation. The present thesis addresses this problem. Axisymmetric, steady-state, Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) simulations of a conical nozzle and three sub-scale contoured nozzles were carried out to numerically predict flow separation in over-expanded rocket nozzles at different nozzle pressure ratios (NPR). The conical nozzle is the JPL 45◦-15◦ and the contoured nozzles are the VAC-S1, the DLR-PAR and the VAC-S6-short. The commercial CFD code ANSYS FLUENT 13 was first validated for simulation of separated cold gas flows in the VAC-S1 nozzle. Some modeling issues in the numerical simulations of flow separation in rocket nozzles were determined. It is recognized that compressibility correction, nozzle-lip thickness and upstream-extension of the external domain are the sources of uncertainty, besides turbulence modeling. In high-speed turbulent flows, compressibility is known to affect dissipation rate of turbulence kinetic energy. As a consequence, a reduction in the spreading rate of supersonic mixing layers occurs. Whereas, the standard turbulence models are developed and calibrated for incompressible flows and hence, do not account for this effect. ANSYS FLUENT uses the compressibility correction proposed by Wilcox [1] which modifies the turbulence dissipation terms based on turbulent Mach number. This, as shown in this thesis, may not be appropriate to the prediction of flow separation in rocket nozzles. Simulation results of the standard SST model, with and without the compressibility correction, are compared with the experimental data at NPR=22 for the DLR-PAR nozzle. Compressibility correction is found to cause under-prediction of separation location and hence its use in the prediction of flow separation is not recommended. In the literature, computational domains for the simulation of DLR subscale nozzles have thick nozzle-lips whereas for the VAC subscale nozzles they have no nozzle-lip. Effect of nozzle-lip thickness on flow separation is studied in the DLR-PAR nozzle by varying its nozzle-lip thickness. It is found that nozzle-lip thickness significantly influences both separation location and post-separation pressure recovery by means of the recirculation bubbles formed at the nozzle-lip. Usually, experimental values of free stream turbulence are unknown. So conventionally, to minimize solution dependence on the boundary conditions specified for the ambient flow, the computational domain external to the nozzle is extended in the upstream direction. Its effect on flow separation is studied in the DLR-PAR nozzle through simulations conducted with and without this domain extension. No considerable effect on separation location and pressure recovery is found. The two eddy-viscosity based turbulence models, Spalart-Allmaras (SA) model and Shear Stress Transport (SST) model, are well known to predict separation location better than other eddy-viscosity models, but with moderate success. Their performances, in terms of predicting separation location and post-separation wall pressure distribution, were compared with each other and evaluated against experimental data for the conical and two contoured nozzles. It is found that they fail to predict the separation location correctly, exhibiting sensitivity to the range of NPRs and to the type of nozzle. Depending on NPR, the SST model either under-predicts or over-predicts Free Shock Separation (FSS). Moreover, it also fails to capture Restricted Shock Separation (RSS). With compressibility correction, it under-predicts separation at all NPRs to a greater extent. Even though RSS is captured by using compressibility correction, the transition from FSS to RSS is over-predicted [2]. Early efforts by few researchers to improve predictions of nozzle flow separation by realizability corrections to turbulence models have not been successful, especially in terms of capturing both the separation types. Therefore, causes of turbulence modeling failure in predicting nozzle flow separation correctly were further investigated. It is learnt that limiting of the shear stress inside boundary layer, due to Bradshaw’s assumption, and over-prediction of jet spreading rate are the causes of SST model’s failure in predicting nozzle flow separation correctly. Based on this physical reasoning, values of the a 1 parameter and the two diffusion coefficients σk,2 and σω,2 were empirically modified to match the predicted wall pressure distributions with experimental data of the DLR-PAR and the VAC-S6-short nozzles. The results confirm that accurate prediction of flow separation in rocket nozzles indeed depends on the correct prediction of spreading rate of the supersonic separation-jet. It is demonstrated that accurate RANS simulation of flow separation in rocket nozzles over a wide range of NPRs is feasible by modified values of the diffusion coefficients in turbulence model.

This thesis constitutes detailed computational investigation on ow through the passages of a centrifugal compressor used for turbocharging applications. Given the dynamic nature of operation of the turbocharger, it becomes necessary to under- stand the ow that occurs within the blade passages and its e ect on performance. CFD is an established computational technique wherein the ow is dissected to fun- damental levels and a detailed picture is presented, application of this technique with limited and diverse sense towards understanding of ows through a turbocharger compressor has been successfully carried out by many before. This work presented attempts to address many of the lacuna reported and carries forward the work of several researchers to ll in the gaps. The complexity of the geometry of the blade shape poses many challenges in model- ing within the virtual space, an e ective way to overcome the obstacles is presented as a part of this work. Grid generation of the impeller and casing are discussed and adaptive approach is followed with generation of hexahedral grids for the impeller whereas tetrahedral for the casing. Since the grids of the impeller and its casing are di erent, ways of interfacing between the two domains in a CFD environment is discussed. An industry standard implicit 3D RANS solver was used to carry out the simula- tions. The importance of use of boundary conditions for the domain at unsteady operating points is presented in detail. On the choice made for turbulence model that governs the validity of the solution obtained, an extensive literature survey of the relevant topic as applicable for centrifugal compressors is presented and logic of the choice made for the present work is discussed. Menter's two equation SST-k! model emerges as the clear choice to be used even though the di erence in perfor- mance predictions by other turbulence models are insigni cant. Dynamics of ow at optimum design point, surge and choke of the compressor are presented in detail. With the geometry modeled with a tip clearance and the casing included within the simulation environment, it can be seen that the performance predicted is closer to actual at all operating points. A study of behavior of the compressor at extreme o design points is carried out and it can be seen that it depicts the trends that are seen in experimental works available in open literature. The distortion of pressure within the vaneless di user and the inviscid nature of the ow within the volute space are e ectively captured and an in depth analysis is carried out to uncover new patterns. A parametric study involving important geometric features such as the tip clearance and wrap angles are conducted leading to discovery of anomalies. The work summarizes to point out that the investigation carried out with the CFD simulations comprehensively leads to uncovering of ow dynamics within a complex system such as the centrifugal compressor within the limits of numerical analysis.

The context of this thesis is the numerical simulation of turbulent flows at moderate Reynolds numbers and the improvement of the capabilities of an in-house 3D unsteady and incompressible flow solver called SFELES to simulate such flows.<p>In addition to this abstract, this thesis includes five other chapters.<p><p>The second chapter of this thesis presents the numerical methods implemented in the two CFD solvers used as part of this work, namely SFELES and PHASTA.<p><p>The third chapter concentrates on the implementation of a new library called FlexMG. This library allows the use of various types of iterative solvers preconditioned by algebraic multigrid methods, which require much less memory to solve linear systems than a direct sparse LU solver available in SFELES. Multigrid is an iterative procedure that relies on a series of increasingly coarser approximations of the original 'fine' problem. The underlying concept is the following: low wavenumber errors on fine grids become high wavenumber errors on coarser levels, which can be effectively removed by applying fixed-point methods on coarser levels.<p>Two families of algebraic multigrid preconditioners have been implemented in FlexMG, namely smooth aggregation-type and non-nested finite element-type. Unlike pure gridless multigrid, both of these families use the information contained in the initial fine mesh. A hierarchy of coarse meshes is also needed for the non-nested finite element-type multigrid so that our approaches can be considered as hybrid. Our aggregation-type multigrid is smoothed with either a constant or a linear least square fitting function, whereas the non-nested finite element-type multigrid is already smooth by construction. All these multigrid preconditioners are tested as stand-alone solvers or coupled with a GMRES (Generalized Minimal RESidual) method. After analyzing the accuracy of the solutions obtained with our solvers on a typical test case in fluid mechanics (unsteady flow past a circular cylinder at low Reynolds number), their performance in terms of convergence rate, computational speed and memory consumption is compared with the performance of a direct sparse LU solver as a reference. Finally, the importance of using smooth interpolation operators is also underlined in this work.<p><p>The fourth chapter is devoted to the study of subgrid scale models for the large eddy simulation (LES) of turbulent flows.<p>It is well known that turbulence features a cascade process by which kinetic energy is transferred from the large turbulent scales to the smaller ones. Below a certain size, the smallest structures are dissipated into heat because of the effect of the viscous term in the Navier-Stokes equations.<p>In the classical formulation of LES models, all the resolved scales are used to model the contribution of the unresolved scales. However, most of the energy exchanges between scales are local, which means that the energy of the unresolved scales derives mainly from the energy of the small resolved scales.<p>In this fourth chapter, constant-coefficient-based Smagorinsky and WALE models are considered under different formulations. This includes a classical version of both the Smagorinsky and WALE models and several scale-separation formulations, where the resolved velocity field is filtered in order to separate the small turbulent scales from the large ones. From this separation of turbulent scales, the strain rate tensor and/or the eddy viscosity of the subgrid scale model is computed from the small resolved scales only. One important advantage of these scale-separation models is that the dissipation they introduce through their subgrid scale stress tensor is better controlled compared to their classical version, where all the scales are taken into account without any filtering. More precisely, the filtering operator (based on a top hat filter in this work) allows the decomposition u' = u - ubar, where u is the resolved velocity field (large and small resolved scales), ubar is the filtered velocity field (large resolved scales) and u' is the small resolved scales field. <p>At last, two variational multiscale (VMS) methods are also considered.<p>The philosophy of the variational multiscale methods differs significantly from the philosophy of the scale-separation models. Concretely, the discrete Navier-Stokes equations have to be projected into two disjoint spaces so that a set of equations characterizes the evolution of the large resolved scales of the flow, whereas another set governs the small resolved scales. <p>Once the Navier-Stokes equations have been projected into these two spaces associated with the large and small scales respectively, the variational multiscale method consists in adding an eddy viscosity model to the small scales equations only, leaving the large scales equations unchanged. This projection is obvious in the case of a full spectral discretization of the Navier-Stokes equations, where the evolution of the large and small scales is governed by the equations associated with the low and high wavenumber modes respectively. This projection is more complex to achieve in the context of a finite element discretization. <p>For that purpose, two variational multiscale concepts are examined in this work.<p>The first projector is based on the construction of aggregates, whereas the second projector relies on the implementation of hierarchical linear basis functions.<p>In order to gain some experience in the field of LES modeling, some of the above-mentioned models were implemented first in another code called PHASTA and presented along with SFELES in the second chapter.<p>Finally, the relevance of our models is assessed with the large eddy simulation of a fully developed turbulent channel flow at a low Reynolds number under statistical equilibrium. In addition to the analysis of the mean eddy viscosity computed for all our LES models, comparisons in terms of shear stress, root mean square velocity fluctuation and mean velocity are performed with a fully resolved direct numerical simulation as a reference.<p><p>The fifth chapter of the thesis focuses on the numerical simulation of the 3D turbulent flow over a re-entry Apollo-type capsule at low speed with SFELES. The Reynolds number based on the heat shield is set to Re=10^4 and the angle of attack is set to 180º, that is the heat shield facing the free stream. Only the final stage of the flight is considered in this work, before the splashdown or the landing, so that the incompressibility hypothesis in SFELES is still valid.<p>Two LES models are considered in this chapter, namely a classical and a scale-separation version of the WALE model. Although the capsule geometry is axisymmetric, the flow field in its wake is not and induces unsteady forces and moments acting on the capsule. The characterization of the phenomena occurring in the wake of the capsule and the determination of their main frequencies are essential to ensure the static and dynamic stability during the final stage of the flight. <p>Visualizations by means of 3D isosurfaces and 2D slices of the Q-criterion and the vorticity field confirm the presence of a large meandering recirculation zone characterized by a low Strouhal number, that is St≈0.15.<p>Due to the detachment of the flow at the shoulder of the capsule, a resulting annular shear layer appears. This shear layer is then affected by some Kelvin-Helmholtz instabilities and ends up rolling up, leading to the formation of vortex rings characterized by a high frequency. This vortex shedding depends on the Reynolds number so that a Strouhal number St≈3 is detected at Re=10^4.<p>Finally, the analysis of the force and moment coefficients reveals the existence of a lateral force perpendicular to the streamwise direction in the case of the scale-separation WALE model, which suggests that the wake of the capsule may have some <p>preferential orientations during the vortex shedding. In the case of the classical version of the WALE model, no lateral force has been observed so far so that the mean flow is thought to be still axisymmetric after 100 units of non-dimensional physical time.<p><p>Finally, the last chapter of this work recalls the main conclusions drawn from the previous chapters. / Doctorat en Sciences de l'ingénieur / info:eu-repo/semantics/nonPublished