Comparison of Single Phase Laminar and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) Solvers Using the OpenFOAM Suite

Abstract

In recent years OpenFOAM solvers and libraries suite have attracted great attention by the academia and industrial practitioners. Principal potentialities of this software are full access to the code, easy solver generation and modification and a huge and open users community among others.
Nevertheless no exhaustive validation against experimental results and with other codes is presented in
literature and there is a big lack of documentation about solver underlying theory.
In this work a series of code-to-code validation is presented using experimental values as a reference.
Firstly laminar cases are analyzed presenting results for two classical benchmarks, Cubic Cavity and Backward Facing Step. For LES solvers, Cubic Cavity is solved again and the ERCOFTAC ”Duct Flows with Smooth and Rough Walls” experiment is revisited.
Theory and solver settings are presented before results in all cases. Results are in good agreement, showing the reliability of these OpenFOAM’s solvers.