EXPERIMENTAL AND NUMERICAL-SIMULATION OF FLOW AROUND 2-DIMENSIONAL HILLS

The present work is devoted to the study of the turbulent isothermal flow around two-dimensional sinusoidal hills. In this work, both experimental and numerical approaches were followed. The experimental results were obtained from a simulation carried out in two wind tunnels, for a Reynolds number, based on the hill's height, ranging from 1.8 x 10(4) to 2.5 x 10(5). The results obtained experimentally comprise static wall pressure distributions, velocity profiles at strategic locations and flow visualisation. The algorithm adopted for the numerical simulation is based on a control volume approach applied to a numerically generated boundary fitted grid. The transport equations are solved using the SIMPLEC formulation, and turbulence is modelled with a modified low-Reynolds number k-epsilon model. The comparison between numerical and experimental results shows an overall good agreement.