Large eddy simulation of vortex shedding from cubic obstacle

This paper discusses the large eddy simulation technique as applied to vortex shedding from a cubic obstacle placed in a turbulent wind environment and presents results from a recent large-scale computation of this flow. The simulation was sufficiently resolved to capture the dynamics of the conical vortices on the roof of the obstacle and to predict the roof pressure footprint in good agreement with the experimental findings. The 3D visualizations of the vortex shedding and an analysis of the mean flow topology are also presented. The computations used a grid of approximately 107 nodes, and they were performed on a Cray T3E parallel machine. The turbulent inflow was taken from a separate precursor simulation targeted so that the obstacle represents a building placed in an urban wind environment.