Applications of URANS on predicting unsteady turbulent separated flows

Accurate prediction of unsteady separated turbulent flows remains one of the toughest tasks and a practical challenge for turbulence modeling. In this paper, a 2D flow past a circular cylinder at Reynolds number 3,900 is numerically investigated by using the technique of unsteady RANS (URANS). Some typical linear and nonlinear eddy viscosity turbulence models (LEVM and NLEVM) and a quadratic explicit algebraic stress model (EASM) are evaluated. Numerical results have shown that a high-performance cubic NLEVM, such as CLS, are superior to the others in simulating turbulent separated flows with unsteady vortex shedding.