A Numerical Study of the Spanwise Turbulence Past a Cylinder Flow
Many flows of industrial interest and many important benchmark turbulent flows are statistically stationary in time and are provided with a spanwise direction of homogeneity. The numerical simulation of such flows is conditioned by the discretization in space and time, and the statistical analysis of the data is biased by the finite extent of the produced dataset. In this work the flow around a circular cylinder at Reynolds 3900 is numerically investigated by an implicit Large Eddy Simulation. The computations are performed by a modal Discontinuous Galerkin finite element solver and the produced database is analysed in order to quantify the temporal and spanwise contribution to the estimation of the statistics. The goal of the work is to investigate a procedure which allows to quantify the statistical efficiency of the operators which are used to perform the average in time and in the spanwise direction. Finally, the hierarchical nature of the modal basis used in each element is exploited to perform a local element-wise filtering operation which allows to quantify the contributions given by the smallest resolved scales to the statistics.
