A pseudo-compressible variational multiscale solver for turbulent incompressible flows

In this work, we design an explicit time-stepping solver for the simulation of the incompressible turbulent flow through the combination of VMS methods and artificial compressibility. We evaluate the effect of the artificial compressibility on the accuracy of the explicit formulation for under-resolved LES simulations. A set of benchmarks have been solved, e.g., the 3D Taylor–Green vortex problem in turbulent regimes. The resulting method is proven to be an effective alternative to implicit methods in some application ranges (in terms of problem size and computational resources), providing comparable results with very low memory requirements. As an example, with the explicit approach, we are able to solve accurately the Taylor-Green vortex benchmark in a fine mesh with 512 ³ cells on a 12 cores 64 GB ram machine.