Application of a Reynolds Stress Model to Engine-Like Flow Calculations

Abstract

A version of a Reynolds stress turbulence model was adopted and applied for calculating turbulence in internal combustion engine flows. Simultaneously, to improve the numerical accuracy of the computations, a skew-upwind differencing scheme was introduced, thereby replacing the less accurate upwind differencing scheme originally present in the computations. With these modifications applied to an existing code, comparisons were made with measured mean and turbulent velocities of a flow field in an axisymmetric piston-cylinder assembly. The results of the computations were generally encouraging particularly for the mean flow. However, discrepancies were observed which are attributed to either (or both) unknown boundary conditions or shortcomings in the Reynolds stress model.