What is meant by the "All y+ Wall Treatment"?

by Alistair Field
on 10/30/2017
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Categories: Wall-Treatment   •  Products: STAR-CCM+   •  Version Applicable: N/A   •  Article Number: 14584

A “Wall Treatment� in STAR-CCM+ is the set of assumptions for modeling near-wall turbulence quantities such as wall shear
stress, turbulent production and turbulent dissipation. Traditionally, the two basic types of wall treatment are :

1. High y+ wall treatment is the classic wall-function approach, where wall shear stress, turbulent production and turbulent
dissipation are all derived from equilibrium turbulent boundary layer theory.  It is assumed that the near-wall cell lies within
the logarithmic region of the boundary layer, therefore the centroid of the cell attached to the wall should have y+ > 30.
2. The low-y+ wall treatment assumes that the viscous sublayer is well resolved by the mesh, and thus wall laws are not
needed. It should only be used if the entire mesh is fine enough for y+ to be approximately 1 or less.

The figure below shows the regions of applicability of the wall treatments:

The all-y+ wall treatment is an additional hybrid wall treatment that attempts to combine the high y+ wall treatment for coarse
meshes and the low y+ wall treatment for fine meshes. It is designed to give results similar to the low-y+ treatment as y+ < 1 and to
the high-y+ treatment for y+ > 30. It is also formulated to produce reasonable answers for meshes of intermediate resolution, when
the wall-cell centroid falls within the buffer region of the boundary layer, i.e. when 1 < y+ < 30.

The "All y+" method blends turbulence quantities (TQ) such as dissipation, production, stress tensor, etc. calculated by the "high-y+"

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approach or by the low-y+ approach using an exponential weighing function. The final value for the turbulence quantity (TQ) is
calculated as:

TQ = g TQ_low + (1-g) TQ_high

where g is given by the following function:

where , a wall-distance-based Reynolds number.

In these equations, the following nomenclature applies:

is the normal distance from the wall to the wall-cell centroid.

is the kinematic viscosity.

k is the turbulent kinetic energy.

See also
Which y+ wall-treatment shall I choose for my mesh?
What are the wall treatment models available for turbulent flows?
How can I graphically check the validity of my turbulence wall treatment model?
How to mesh prism layers for effective y+ values

STAR-CCM+ user guide

User Guide > Modeling Physics > Modeling Turbulence > Wall Treatment

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