A comparative study of turbulence models performance for separating flow in a planar asymmetric diffuser

This paper presents a computational study of the separated flow in a planar asymmetric diffuser. The steady RANS equations for turbulent incompressible fluid flow and six turbulence closures are used in the present study. The commercial software code, FLUENT 6.3.26, was used for solving the set of governing equations using various turbulence models. Five of the used turbulence models are available directly in the code while the nu(2)-f turbulence model was implemented via user defined scalars (UDS) and user defined functions (UDF). A series of computational analysis is performed to assess the performance of turbulence models at different grid density. The results show that the standard k-omega, SST k-omega.) and nu(2)-f models clearly performed better than other models when an adverse pressure gradient was present. The RSM model shows an acceptable agreement with the velocity and turbulent kinetic energy profiles but it failed to predict the location of separation and attachment points. The standard k-epsilon and the low-Re k-epsilon delivered very poor results. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.