On simulating the turbulent flow around the Ahmed body: a french-german collaborative evaluation of LES and DES

Abstract : The paper presents a comparative analysis of recent simulations, conducted in the framework of a French-German collaboration on LES of Complex Flows, for the so-called Ahmed body at Reynolds number 768000 and slant angle 25°. It provides a juxtaposition of results obtained with different eddy-resolving modeling approaches, i.e. two Large Eddy Simulations (LES) on body-fitted curvilinear grids, a stabilized spectral method and a Detachted Eddy Simulation (DES) on an unstructured grid. The paper presents a comprehensive data base including both instantaneous and statistical data. A central achievement is the comparative assessment of the different approaches with an appreciation of the respective advantages and disadvantages of the various methods. In particular, issues on computational cost and ease of implementation are addressed in addition to the quality of results.