Reproduce results from Vynnycky for flow-over-plate tutorial

[BenjaminRodenberg]

As described in [1], we currently cannot reproduce the results from the Vynnycky paper [2] with the flow-over-plate tutorial. Comparing the measurements of our simulation with the results from [2] gives the following plot:

The main conclusion from [1] is the following: Coupling buoyantPimpleFoam with laplacianFoam (OF-OF) gives similar results as coupling buoyantPimpleFoam with FEniCS (OF-FE). However, both results do not agree with the reference results from [2] (Vynnycky).

More details and possibly helpful scripts can be found here (e.g. case files, simulation parameters, plotting scripts).

The main open questions are the following:

How to choose the temperature of the plate and at the inflow?

There are no numbers given in [2]. However, the results strongly depend on the temperatures used. And they are not independend, as the non-dimensional parameter theta suggests.

How to choose boundary conditions and geometry?

The geometry used for obtaining the results from above is not in agreement with the geometry from the Vynnycky paper. A comparison of both geometries and boundary conditions being used is given in [1, sl. 17]. Refer to [1, sl. 20] for results using the actual geometry from [2]. However, even if we use the correct geometry, we do not obtain the reference solution.

References

[1] B. Rüth, P. Meisrimel, P. Birken, G. Chourdakis and B. Uekermann: Using FEniCS and OpenFOAM for the simulation of conjugate heat transfer in a partitioned fashion, In 90th GAMM Annual Meeting, 2019.
[2] Vynnycky, M., et al. (1998). Forced convection heat transfer from a flat plate: the conjugate problem.

[MakisH]

Definition of "done":

• Correct the configuration of the existing tutorials so that they give results close enough to the paper.
• Document the reason behind this and what to change here, in a Pull Request, and/or in the respective documentation pages.

Furthermore, one could look at alternative literature, but this does not concern the issue itself.

[davidscn]

It's worth mentioning that Vynnycky describes a steady state case whereas we use the transient buoyuantPimpleFoam in the tutorials. Investigations with the steady state solver buoyuantSimpleFoam would be interesting (as also used in Makis thesis for an OpenFOAM-CalculiX coupling).

[MakisH]

FYI, this is the same steady-state solver we use in the heat exchanger tutorial.

[MakisH]

@BenjaminRodenberg what is the state of this issue?

[BenjaminRodenberg]

@MakisH No updates. I will probably not start working on this issue anytime soon. I think this would be a nice project/thesis, if somebody wants to take over.

[vollmerb]

I partly addressed this issue in my own work a few years ago. It seems the major issue is the far-field boundary is not far enough from the plate. Here is an internal document describing my findings:

preCICE_Heat_Transfer_Issues.pdf

[MakisH]

Thank you for sharing your findings! 🤗

We can definitely improve the setups of the cases to closer match experiments.