Benchmark computations of 3D laminar flow around a cylinder with CFX, OpenFOAM and FeatFlow

Numerically challenging, comprehensive benchmark cases are of great importance for researchers in the field of CFD. Numerical benchmark cases offer researchers frameworks to quantitatively explore limits of the computational tools and to validate them. Therefore, we focus on simulation of numerically challenging benchmark tests, laminar and transient 3D flows around a cylinder, and aim to establish a new comprehensive benchmark case by doing direct numerical simulations with three distinct CFD software packages. Although the underlying benchmark problems have been defined firstly in 1996, the first case which was a steady simulation of flow around a cylinder at Re = 20 could be accurately solved first in 2002 by John. Moreover, there is no precisely determined results for non-stationary case, the simulation of transient flow with time varying Reynolds number. The benchmark problems are studied with three CFD software packages, OpenFOAM, Ansys-CFX and FeatFlow which employ different numerical approaches to the discretization of the incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, namely finite volume method, element based finite volume method and finite element method respectively. The first benchmark test is considered as the “necessary condition” for the software tools, then they are compared according to their accuracy and performance in the second benchmark test. All the software tools successfully pass the first test and show well agreeing results for the second case such that the benchmark result was precisely determined. As a main result, the CFD software package with high order finite element approximation has been found to be computationally more efficient and accurate than the ones adopting low order space discretization methods. ∗Corresponding author