Large Eddy Simulation of a three-dimensional turbulent mixing layer by means of a Vortex Particle-Mesh method

A Large Eddy Simulation (LES) of a spatially-developing three-dimensional incompressible turbulent mixing layer has been performed. The solver relies on the vortex-particle mesh method. It uses particles for the advection of the vorticity field and an underlying grid to resolve the Poisson equation for the velocity and compute the differential operators. The mesh has a fine resolution with more than six million grid points and the initial Reynolds number based on the vorticity thickness and the velocity difference is high with a value of one hundred thousand. Two- and three-dimensional views of the flow are presented and the fully-turbulent region occupies half of the domain. The flow statistics are plotted in order to highlight the self-similarity of some profiles and the linear growth rate of the mixing layer. They are compared to the experimental data of Brown and Roshko