A new linear forcing method for isotropic turbulence with controlled integral length scale

International audienceTurbulence is a common feature to all flows that surround us. Despite its ubiquity, particularly in industrial flows, it is very difficult to provide a mathematical framework to the generation of turbulent eddies. Several techniques have been proposed which are able to reproduce the main features of turbulent flows, such as realistic pressure and velocity fluctuations, exhibiting proper space- and time-correlations. These techniques are usually first evaluated upon sustained homogeneous isotropic turbulence by introducing body forces to the Navier-Stokes equations. Among these techniques, Lundgren suggested a successful forcing, applied in physical space. The latter approach unfortunately lacks predicting the integral length scale of turbulence. The present study provides a forcing method based on a reconstruction approach which consists in building fluctuations with a turbulent synthetic velocity field based on a prescribed energy spectrum model. The proposed approach is assessed by performing large-eddy simulations of a sustained homogeneous isotropic turbulence in a triply periodic box of size L = 2pi. Properties of the new forcing technique are discussed, drawingon both spatial and time correlations and also on the shape of energy spectrum together with the level of resolved turbulent kinetic energy. A special attention is put on the control of resolved turbulent energy. In this framework, an efficient selective forcing technique is derived, making use of spectral space features. The results show that the proposed approach allows to drive efficiently the resolved kinetic energy towards its target value while preserving the integral length scale independent of the domain size. It is observed that the resulting longitudinal length scale is overestimated by 13%, while the two-time correlations are recovered when using stochastic frequencies