Cartesian based finite volume formulation for LES of mixed convection in a vertical turbulent pipe flow

A numerical study was performed to investigate the effects of heating and buoyancy on the turbulent structures and transport in turbulent pipe flow. Isoflux wall boundary conditions with low and high heating were imposed. The compressible filtered Navier-Stokes equations were solved using a second order accurate finite volume method. Low Mach number preconditioning was used to enable the compressible code to work efficiently at low Mach numbers. A dynamic subgrid-scale stress model accounted for the subgrid-scale turbulence. The results showed that strong heating caused distortions of the flow structures resulting in reduction of turbulent intensities, shear stresses, and turbulent heat flux, particularly near the wall. The effect of heating was to raise the mean streamwise velocity in the central region and reduce the velocity near the wall resulting in velocity distributions that resembled laminar profiles for the high heating case.