A high-order accurate discontinuous galerkin method for turbomachinery applications

In the last decade, Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) methods have been the subject of extensive research effort because of their excellent performance in the high-order accurate discretization of advection-diffusion problems on general unstructured grids, and are nowadays finding use in several different applications. In this paper, the potential offered by a high-order accurate DG space discretization method with implicit time integration for the solution of the Reynolds- averaged Navier-Stokes equations coupled with the kω turbulence model is investigated in the numerical simulation of the turbulent flow through the well known T106A turbine cascade. The numerical results demonstrate that, by exploiting high order accurate DG schemes, it is possible to compute accurate simulations of this flow on very coarse grids, with both the high-Reynolds and low-Reynolds number versions of the k-ω turbulence model.