Direct numerical simulation of turbulent channel flow with mixed spectral-finite difference technique

The flow of a viscous incompressible fluid in a plane channel is simulated numerically with the use of a computational code for numerical integration of the Navier-Stokes equations. The numerical method is based on a mixed spectral-finite difference algorithm. The calculations in the two homogeneous directions (the streamwise and the spanwise) are performed in the Fourier space and second-order finite differences are used in the direction orthogonal to the walls. A turbulent-flow database representing the turbulent statistically steady state of the velocity field through 10 viscous time units is assembled at a nominal friction Reynolds number Re 180. A number of turbulence statistics is computed, showing a good agreement with numerical results in particular obtained by other authors with fully spectral codes.