Characterization of oscillatory instability in lid driven cavity flows using lattice Boltzmann method

Area of Science:

• Computational Fluid Dynamics
• Fluid Mechanics
• Numerical Simulation

Background:

• Lid-driven cavities are fundamental in fluid dynamics research.
• Understanding flow transitions is crucial for predicting complex fluid behaviors.
• Previous studies primarily focused on 2D deep cavities.

Purpose of the Study:

• To simulate and analyze 3D lid-driven cubic and deep cavity flows.
• To investigate the effect of cavity depth on flow stability and transition.
• To validate a computational fluid dynamics code using the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) and large eddy simulation (LES).

Main Methods:

• Application of the lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) for fluid flow simulation.
• Turbulence modeling using large eddy simulation (LES) with the Smagorinsky sub-grid scale model.
• Validation against established cubic cavity flow data and analysis of deep cavities with varying aspect ratios.

Main Results:

• The first Hopf bifurcation Reynolds number negatively correlates with cavity depth.
• Cubic cavities exhibit steady flow up to Re=2100, transitioning to oscillatory flow at higher Reynolds numbers.
• Deep cavities show a transition to anti-symmetry breaking flow with increasing Reynolds number.

Conclusions:

• Cavity depth significantly influences the transition to oscillatory flow.
• The developed LBM code is validated and demonstrates efficient parallel performance.
• Findings provide insights into the stability of 3D cavity flows and support extensive computational searches.