FLUENT 6.3 User's Guide - 12.11.

1 Near-Wall Mesh Guidelines 8/28/18, 11'45 AM

12.11.1 Near-Wall Mesh Guidelines

Wall Functions

The log-law, which is valid for equilibrium boundary layers and fully developed flows, provides upper and
lower bounds on the acceptable distance between the cell centroid and the wall for wall-adjacent cells. The
distance is usually measured in the wall unit, ( ), or . Note that and have

comparable values when the first cell is placed in the log-layer.

For standard or non-equilibrium wall functions, each wall-adjacent cell's centroid should be located
within the log-law layer, .A value close to the lower bound ( ) is most
desirable.

Although FLUENT employs the linear (laminar) law when , using an excessively fine
mesh near the walls should be avoided, because the wall functions cease to be valid in the viscous
sublayer.

As much as possible, the mesh should be made either coarse or fine enough to prevent the wall-
adjacent cells from being placed in the buffer layer ( ).

The upper bound of the log-layer depends on, among others, pressure gradients and Reynolds number.
As the Reynolds number increases, the upper bound tends to also increase. values that are too large

are not desirable, because the wake component becomes substantially large above the log-layer.

Using excessive stretching in the direction normal to the wall should be avoided.

It is important to have at least a few cells inside the boundary layer.

Enhanced Wall Treatment

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Although the enhanced wall treatment is designed to extend the validity of near-wall modeling beyond the
viscous sublayer, it is still recommended that you construct a mesh that will fully resolve the viscosity-
affected near-wall region. In such a case, the two-layer component of the enhanced wall treatment will be
dominant and the following mesh requirements are recommended (note that, here, the mesh requirements are
in terms of , not ):

When the enhanced wall treatment is employed with the intention of resolving the laminar sublayer,
at the wall-adjacent cell should be on the order of . However, a higher is acceptable

as long as it is well inside the viscous sublayer ( to 5).

You should have at least 10 cells within the viscosity-affected near-wall region ( ) to be
able to resolve the mean velocity and turbulent quantities in that region.

Spalart-Allmaras Model

The Spalart-Allmaras model in its complete implementation is a low-Reynolds-number model. This means
that it is designed to be used with meshes that properly resolve the viscous-affected region, and damping
functions have been built into the model in order to properly attenuate the turbulent viscosity in the viscous
sublayer. Therefore, to obtain the full benefit of the Spalart-Allmaras model, the near-wall mesh spacing
should be as described in Section 12.11.1 for the enhanced wall treatment.

However, as discussed in Section 12.3.7, the boundary conditions for the Spalart-Allmaras model have been
implemented so that the model will work on coarser meshes, such as would be appropriate for the wall
function approach. If you are using a coarse mesh, you should follow the guidelines described in Section
12.11.1.

In summary, for best results with the Spalart-Allmaras model, you should use either a very fine near-wall
mesh spacing (on the order of ) or a mesh spacing such that .

- Models

Both - models available in FLUENT are available as low-Reynolds-number models as well as high-
Reynolds-number models. If the Transitional Flows option is enabled in the Viscous Model panel, low-
Reynolds-number variants will be used, and, in that case, mesh guidelines should be the same as for the
enhanced wall treatment. However, if this option is not active, then the mesh guidelines should be the same as
for the wall functions.

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Large Eddy Simulation

For the LES implementation in FLUENT, the wall boundary conditions have been implemented using a law-
of-the-wall approach as described in Section 12.9.4. This means that there are no computational restrictions
on the near-wall mesh spacing. However, for best results, it might be necessary to use a very fine near-wall
mesh spacing (on the order of ).

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