Evaluation of wall functions for RANS turbulence models by unsteady lid-driven cavity flow

Abstract Turbulence models do not perform well near walls because the Reynolds number in this interesting area is low. The wall functions and the advantage method can be efficiently used to model fluid flow at the near wall region. The Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes turbulence models which had the developed wall functions in Open FOAM, the open source CFD software, were evaluated by the turbulent flow. The 3-D lid-driven cavity flow at the turbulence Reynolds number of 10,000 with various spanwise aspect ratio had been referred to validate these turbulence models. The comparison shown that the realizable k-ɛ turbulence model with the standard k and ɛ wall functions of OpenFOAM was the most powerful model to represent the velocity profile of water flow in the 3-D lid-driven cavities.