Study of turbulent flow over a backward facing step

Abstract

Turbulence is the chaotic motion of fluid occurring in most of the natural and other flow fields. Since it is very difficult to treat the turbulent flow analytically, various techniques and models have been developed to describe turbulent flow - with the help of the increasing power of computers- numerically. The present study incorporates a numerical treatment of a turbulent flow over a backward facing step having a circular obstacle. The standard k  turbulence model is used to simulate and obtain the numerical results. This turbulence model has been solved using Galerkin weighted residual finite element method. The effect of size and position of the circular obstacle on the streamlines, velocity magnitude, pressure distribution, velocity profiles and turbulent kinetic energy profiles are presented graphically. The result shows that size and position of the obstacle has noteworthy effect on the aforementioned parameter profiles.