Large-Eddy Simulation of Flow Through an Array of Cubes with Local Grid Refinement

High resolution simulations of the transport of urban contaminants are important for disaster response and city planning. Large-eddy simulation (LES) and mesh refinement can each be used to decrease the computational cost of modelling, but combining these techniques can result in additional errors at grid-refinement interfaces. Here, we study the effect of the turbulence closure on the accuracy of LES results, for grids with mesh refinement, in a test case of flow through a periodic array of cubes. It is found that a mixed-model turbulence closure, using both an eddy viscosity and a scale similarity component, reduces energy accumulation at grid-refinement interfaces when used with explicit filtering of the advection term. The mixed model must be used with explicit filtering to control high wavenumber errors generated by the non-linear scale-similarity model. The results demonstrate that the turbulence closure mitigates errors associated with using LES on block-structured grids for urban-flow simulations.