Heat transfer modeling plays a major role in design and optimization of modern and efficient thermal-fluid systems. Further, turbulent flows are thermodynamic processes, and thus, the second law of thermodynamics can be used for critical evaluations of such heat transfer models. However, currently available heat transfer models suffer from a fundamental shortcoming: their development is based on the general notion that accurate prediction of the flow field will guarantee an appropriate prediction of the thermal field, known as the . In this work, an assessment of the capability of the in predicting turbulent heat transfer when applied to shear flows of fluids of different Prandtl numbers will be given. Towards this, a detailed analysis of the predictive capabilities of the concerning entropy generation is presented for steady and unsteady state simulations. It turns out that the provides acceptable results only for mean entropy generation, while fails to predict entropy generation at small/sub-grid scales.

In this paper, a wall-adapted anisotropic heat flux model for large eddy simulations of complex engineering applications is proposed. First, the accuracy and physical consistency of the novel heat flux model are testified for turbulent heated channel flows with different fluid properties by comparing with conventional isotropic models. Then, the performance of the model is evaluated in case of more complex heat and fluid flow situations that are in particular relevant for internal combustion engines and engine exhaust systems. For this purpose large eddy simulations of a strongly heated pipe flow, a turbulent inclined jet impinging on a heated solid surface and a backward-facing step flow with heated walls were carried out. It turned out that the proposed heat flux model has the following advantages over existing model formulations: (1) it accounts for variable fluid properties and anisotropic effects in the unresolved temperature scales, (2) no ad-hoc treatments or dynamic procedure are required to obtain the correct near-wall behavior, (3) the formulation is consistent with the second law of thermodynamics, and (4) the model has a similar prediction accuracy and computational effort than conventional isotropic models. In particular, it is shown that the proposed heat flux model is the only model under consideration that is able to predict the direction of subgrid-scale heat fluxes correctly, also under realistic heat and fluid flow conditions in complex engineering applications.