78th Annual Meeting of the APS Division of Fluid Dynamics (Nov 23 — 25, 2025)

V002: ALE simulation of compressible turbulence driven by the lock-exchange

A high-order Arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) finite-element code developed at Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, called Marbl, is used to simulate the non-Boussinesq lock exchange problem in a tall box. The lock exchange is a widely studied fundamental fluid dynamics problem in which gravity currents drive the entrainment of a denser fluid into a lighter one, here both described by ideal gas laws at low ambient pressure. This situation is a prototype for the study of pyroclastic flows from volcanic eruptions, turbidity currents in the ocean, fires in semi-enclosed spaces, and a wide range of other geophysical and industrial flows. In this simulation the interaction of the gravity currents with the walls ultimately leads to decaying compressible turbulence; the chaotic flows associated with turbulence are faithfully produced using this next-generation ALE code. This three-dimensional simulation made use of 1.8 billion quadrature points and was produced on the Tuolumne supercomputer.This work was performed under the auspices of the U.S. Department of Energy by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory under Contract DE-AC52-07NA27344. LLNL-ABS-2007817.