NeuralFlowTheory & User Reference Manual
Wall Functions and Thermal Boundary Treatment
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10 Wall Functions and Thermal Boundary Treatment

NeuralFlow uses wall closures to connect the cell-centred RANS state to wall shear and heat flux without requiring the first cell centre to remain at one prescribed . The currently documented branch uses continuous viscous/logarithmic blends for momentum and temperature. The same wall quantities are differentiated in the implicit boundary assembly when they depend on active solution variables.

10.1 Tangential relative velocity

Let be the fluid velocity at the wall-adjacent cell and the wall velocity. With wall normal , define the relative tangential velocity The wall distance is the normal/near-wall distance supplied by the wall-distance infrastructure.

10.2 Velocity scale and wall distance

For the GE-RANS wall treatment, a blended velocity scale is (10.1) and (10.2) This construction retains a molecular contribution near the wall and a turbulence-related contribution when is active.

10.3 Continuous velocity blend

The viscous and logarithmic limits are with and in the documented current branch. The continuous blend is (10.3) It approaches the viscous law for small and the logarithmic law for sufficiently large without a discrete switch.

10.4 Thermal wall law

Define the molecular Prandtl number with turbulent Prandtl number . A Kader-type continuous thermal blend (Kader 1981) uses (10.4) (10.5) and (10.6) The corresponding unblown gas-side heat-transfer coefficient is (10.7) The same expression spans the conductive sublayer, buffer layer, and logarithmic region.

10.5 Wall shear and heat flux

A wall shear vector has the generic form where is supplied by the active wall-function relation. Its face-integrated momentum contribution is .

For a stationary thermal wall with no blowing, the convective part of the gas-side heat flux is represented as (10.8) with optional viscous-heating correction where enabled. Adiabatic, prescribed-temperature, prescribed-flux, external-convection/radiation, and conjugate configurations require different closure equations for and ; they must all reduce to a dimensionally consistent energy flux in .

10.6 Turbulence wall quantities

For –-class closures, the nondimensional specific dissipation is The near-wall treatment blends viscous and logarithmic asymptotes rather than switching abruptly at one grid threshold. Turbulence production, turbulent viscosity, and the wall-normal distance must be recomputed consistently whenever the solution, turbulence model, or multigrid level changes.

10.7 Implicit boundary assembly

A boundary heat flux contributes to the total-energy residual. If it depends on active cell variables, NeuralFlow uses AD in the active boundary path so the local thermal/momentum response can enter the coupled Jacobian. This is particularly important for wall laws in which , , , turbulence, and wall temperature are mutually dependent.

10.8 10.8 Current limitations and user checks

The velocity and Kader-type thermal relations above are used by the wall treatment and the boundary-attached charring model. For non-adiabatic conjugate-heat-transfer and moving-wall cases, qualify the total energy balance carefully: compare heat transferred from the fluid with heat received by the solid, monitor wall heat flux and verify that moving-wall mechanical work is negligible or otherwise accounted for in the intended case.

For customer simulations, this means that adiabatic walls and the standard wall-function relations can be interpreted directly from the equations in this chapter, while advanced non-adiabatic CHT or moving-wall energy studies should include an explicit conservation check and, where important, comparison against a validation case.