Direct numerical simulation of a turbulent flow using a spectral/hp element method

Direct numerical simulation (DNS) of incompressible turbulent pipe flow was carried out on unstructured grids for a Reynolds number based on the friction velocity and the pipe diameter of Re τ = 360 using the spectral/hp element method (SEM) by Karniadakis and Sherwin [3]. The main objective was to investigate the computational aspects of this DNS with respect to accuracy, CPU time and memory requirements. DNS results of evaluated statistical moments of up to fourth order agree well with data from the literature. A conducted performance study reveals the computational requirements for DNS of turbulent flows using this SEM