Investigation of a Turbulent Separating Boundary Layer by Direct Numerical Simulation

A direct numerical simulation of a separating and reattaching turbulent boundary layer on a flat plate was conducted on a high performance computer. The separation has been introduced by a stream wise pressure gradient that corresponds to the one of an actually performed experiment (Kalter and Fernholz, [10]). The use of a locally refined grid near the wall is one of the key points that allowed the simulation on the presently available hardware. The comparison between experiment and simulation is fully satisfying considering that the Reynolds number of the experiment could not be achieved in the simulation.