Spectral vanishing viscosity for large-eddy simulations by spectral element methods

Spectral Vanishing Viscosity (SVV) method was initially proposed tostabilize the computations of hyperbolic conservation laws when higher orderspectral method was employed. Recently it was found that the SVV method canalso be applied to large eddy simulations (LES) of incompressible flowswithout sub-grid scales (SGS) modeling. In this paper, a new SVV-LES methodwas proposed using Legendre spectral element discretizations. A new operatorin variational form was introduced to replace the SVV operator and theviscosity operator in NS equations in order to implement the proposedSVV-LES method in a standard spectral element code with few modificationswithout significant increase of the computational cost. A large-eddysimulation case of the lid-driven cubic cavity flow at Reynolds numberRe=12000 was carried out. The simulation results showed good agreements withthe direct numerical simulation (DNS) or experimental results to demonstratethe efficiency and robustness of the proposed SVV-LES method. In addition,the impact of the SVV control parameters on the obtained results was alsoinvestigated.