Turbulent plane Couette flow at low Reynolds number using OpenFOAM

A direct numerical simulation (DNS) using open source CFD code OpenFOAM was carried out for plane turbulent Couette flow at a Reynolds number of 1660 and a corresponding friction Reynolds number of 100. A large enough computational box was chosen to accommodate the largest scales of the turbulence. The aim of the project was twofold. The first was to study fluid physics of the flow with the help of statistical averages like the plots of mean velocity profile, both in inner and outer scales, turbulence intensity, Reynolds shear stress, vorticity fluctuation intensity, turbulent kinetic energy production, dissipation and diffusion, two-point velocity co-relations and energy spectrum. The second aim was to test the turbulent DNS capabilities of OpenFOAM. A spectral code with the same setup was employed in parallel and its data was used as a benchmark for OpenFOAM to compare with.