A comparison of dispersion calculations in bluff body wakes using LES and unsteady RANS

Accurate modeling of the dispersion behavior of sprays or particles is critical for a variety of problems including combustion, urban pollution or release events, and splash and spray transport around heavy vehicles. Bluff body wakes are particularly challenging since these flows are both highly separated and strongly unsteady. Attempting to model the dispersion of droplets or particles interacting with bluff body wakes is even more difficult since small differences in the flow field encountered by particles can lead to large differences in the dispersion behavior. Particles with finite inertia can exhibit additional complicating effects such as preferential concentration. In this preliminary study, we consider the dispersion of solid particles in the wake of a rectangular plane at a Reynolds number (Re) of 10000 and that of droplets in the wake of a simplified tractor-trailer geometry at Re = 2 x 10{sup 6} using both the Large Eddy Simulation (LES) and Unsteady Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (URANS) turbulence modeling approaches. The calculations were performed using identical meshes for both the LES and URANS models. Particle stresses are not backcoupled to the carrier fluid velocity solution. In the case of the rectangular plane wake, the LES calculation predicts a finer-scale and more persistent wake structure than the URANS one; the resulting particle dispersion is considerably ({approx} 40%) underpredicted for low inertia particles. For the case of the simplified tractor-trailer geometry, although the LES is underresolved, similar trends are observed with strong differences in the vertical and horizontal dispersion of the smallest particles. These results suggest that it may be necessary to use LES to accurately capture the dispersion behavior of small, low inertia particles or droplets, but that URANS may be sufficient for problems in which only large particles with substantial inertia are of primary concern