A balanced outflow boundary condition for swirling flows

Abstract

In open flow simulations, the dispersion characteristics of disturbances near synthetic boundaries can lead to unphysical boundary scattering interactions that contaminate the resolved flow upstream by propagating numerical artifacts back into the domain interior. This issue is exacerbated in flows influenced by real or apparent body forces, which can significantly disrupt the normal stress balance along outflow boundaries and generate spurious pressure disturbances. To address this problem, this paper develops a zero-parameter, physics-based outflow boundary condition (BC) designed to minimize pressure scattering from body forces and pseudo-forces and enhance transparency of the artificial boundary. This “balanced outflow BC” is then compared against other common BCs from the literature using example axisymmetric and three-dimensional open swirling flow computations. Due to centrifugal and Coriolis forces, swirling flows are known to be particularly challenging to simulate in open geometries, as these apparent forces induce non-trivial hydrostatic stress distributions along artificial boundaries that cause scattering issues. In this context, the balanced outflow BC is shown to correspond to a geostrophic hydrostatic stress correction that balances the induced pressure gradients. Unlike the alternatives, the balanced outflow BC yields accurate results in truncated domains for both linear and nonlinear computations without requiring assumptions about wave characteristics along the boundary.