Energy preserving turbulent simulations at a reduced computational cost

Energy-conserving discretizations are widely regarded as a fundamental requirement for high-fidelity simulations of turbulent flows. The skew-symmetric splitting of the nonlinear term is a well-known approach to obtain semi-discrete conservation of energy in the inviscid limit. However, its computation is roughly twice as expensive as that of the divergence or advective forms alone. A novel time-advancement strategy that retains the conservation properties of skew-symmetric-based schemes at a reduced computational cost has been developed. This method is based on properly constructed Runge–Kutta schemes in which a different form (advective or divergence) for the convective term is adopted at each stage. A general framework is presented to derive schemes with prescribed accuracy on both solution and energy conservation. Simulations of homogeneous isotropic turbulence show that the new procedure is effective and can be considerably faster than skew-symmetric-based techniques.