A high accuracy Leray-deconvolution model of turbulence and its limiting behavior

William Layton, Roger Lewandowski

Published 2007-01-12Version 1

In 1934 J. Leray proposed a regularization of the Navier-Stokes equations whose limits were weak solutions of the NSE. Recently, a modification of the Leray model, called the Leray-alpha model, has atracted study for turbulent flow simulation. One common drawback of Leray type regularizations is their low accuracy. Increasing the accuracy of a simulation based on a Leray regularization requires cutting the averaging radius, i.e., remeshing and resolving on finer meshes. This report analyzes a family of Leray type models of arbitrarily high orders of accuracy for fixed averaging radius. We establish the basic theory of the entire family including limiting behavior as the averaging radius decreases to zero, (a simple extension of results known for the Leray model). We also give a more technically interesting result on the limit as the order of the models increases with fixed averaging radius. Because of this property, increasing accuracy of the model is potentially cheaper than decreasing the averaging radius (or meshwidth) and high order models are doubly interesting.