An assessment of two classes of variational multiscale methods for the simulation of incompressible turbulent flows

A numerical assessment of two classes of variational multiscale (VMS) methods for the simulation of incompressible flows is presented. Two types of residual-based VMS methods and two types of projection-based VMS methods are included in this assessment. The numerical simulations are performed at turbulent channel flow problems with various friction Reynolds numbers. It turns out the residual-based VMS methods, in particular when used with a pair of inf–sup stable finite elements, give usually the most accurate results for second order statistics. For this pair of finite element spaces, a flexible GMRES method with a Least Squares Commutator (LSC) preconditioner proved to be an efficient solver. © 2020 Elsevier B.V.