Plenary Lecture
Boundary Layers Modeling for Developing Turbulent Flow
Professor Sabah Tamimi
College of Engineering & Computing
AlGhurair University
Dubai, United Arab Emirates
E-mail: sabah@agu.ac.ae
Abstract: One of the important applications of Engineering and applied Computer Science disciplines is the fluid motion which can be represented by the Navier-Stockes (N-S) equations. An analytical solution is intractable to be obtained this is due to the complexity of these equations and due to the growth of technology, these applications take advantage of the increasing speed of computers and hardware capabilities. Therefore, as alternative methodology, is the so called computational fluid dynamics (CFD) which has been developed and used with confidence to solve set of non linear partial equations which can simulate the flow process and solve a large range of flow problems and at the same time can offer a cost-effective to many fluid problems especially where experimentation is extremely difficult to obtain. Numerous theoretical and experimental works are available on laminar flow, but this is not the case of turbulent flow. Since it has not been possible to obtain exact analytical solutions to such flows, an accurate numerical approach would be very beneficial to researchers. The finite element method (FEM) recently emerged as a powerful tool for solving the N-S equations. In the present work, the finite element method is used to discretise the equations governing the fluid motion within the computational domain (main domain). An effective technique is required to model the variation in velocity and kinetic energy, which is extremely large near the solid wall since the transfer of shear form the boundary into the main domain and the nature of the flow changes rapidly. The general use of conversational finite element elements up to the wall is not economically viable. Since a significant grid refinement would be required this would be costly in both computer storage and C.P.U. time. A more common approach is to terminate the actual domain at some small distance away from the wall, where the gradients of the independent variables are relatively small, and then another technique is needed to model the flow behavior in the near wall zone. The most traditional technique is the utilization of empirical universal laws. It is found that these laws are not valid in general, since these laws are really applicable for certain unidimensional flow regimes. Presently, a wall element technique, based on the use of the finite element method has been adopted and applied successfully for turbulent flow. This technique can be used with confidence and replaces other techniques. This lecture will present the validity of the wall element technique to simulate developing turbulent flow.
Brief Biography of the Speaker: Dr. Sabah Tamimi holds a M.Sc. in Computer Science (1988) and a Ph.D. in Applied Computer Science (1992), both of them from University of Wales, UK.
He is working continuously as a full-time academic faculty for more than 21 years at university level. In addition, the last 11 years, he has been involved in administrative sector working as Deputy Dean and Dean as well as faculty. He is currently an Associate Professor at the College of Engineering and Computing, Al Ghurair University, United Arab Emirates. His research interests include: computer modeling and simulation, computational flow dynamics, software testing techniques, computer graphics and databases. He has a very good number of publications in International journals and conferences proceeding (of IEEE, WSEAS, etc.), and reviewed many papers for international journals and conferences. Also, he is an editorial board member of different international journals.