This thesis focuses on the turbulent bluff body wakes in incompressible and compressible flows. An incompressible wake flow past an axisymmetric body of revolution at a diameter-based Reynolds number Re=5000 is investigated via a direct numerical simulation. It is followed by the development of a compressible solver using a split-form discontinuous Galerkin spectral element method framework with shock capturing. In the study on incompressible wake flows, three dominant coherent vortical motions are identified in the wake: the vortex shedding motion with the frequency of St=0.27, the bubble pumping motion with St=0.02, and the very-low-frequency (VLF) motion originated in the very near wake of the body with the frequencies St=0.002 and 0.005. The very-low-frequency motion is associated with a slow precession of the wake barycenter. The vortex shedding pattern is demonstrated to follow a reflectional symmetry breaking mode, with the detachment location rotating continuously and making a full circle over one vortex shedding period. The VLF radial motion with St=0.005 originates as m = 1 mode, but later transitions into m = 2 mode in the intermediate wake. Proper orthogonaldecomposition (POD) and dynamic mode decomposition (DMD) are further performed to analyze the spatial structure associated with the dominant coherent motions. Results of the POD and DMD analysis are consistent with the results of the azimuthal Fourier analysis. To extend the current incompressible code to be able to solve compressible flows, a computational methodology is developed using a high-order approximation for the compressible Navier-Stokes equations with discontinuities. The methodology is based on a split discretization framework with a summation-by-part operator. An entropy viscosity method and a subcell finite volume method are implemented to capture discontinuities. The developed high-order split-form with shock-capturing methodology is subject to a series of evaluation on cases from subsonic to hypersonic, from one-dimensional to three dimensional. The Taylor-Green vortex case and the supersonic sphere wake case show the capability to handle three-dimensional turbulent flows without and with the presence of shocks. It is also shown that higher-order approximations yield smaller errors than lower-order approximations, for the same number of total degrees of freedom.

With the ever-increasing demand for high-end services, technological companies have been forced to operate on high performance servers. In addition to the customer services, the company's internal need to store and manage huge amounts of data has also increased their need to invest in High Density Data Centers. As a result, the performance to size of the data center has increased tremendously. Most of the consumed power by the servers is emitted as heat. In a High Density Data Center, the power per floor space area is higher compared to the regular data center. Hence the thermal management of this type of data center is relatively complicated.

Because of the very high power emission in a smaller containment, improper maintenance can result in failure of the data center operation in a shorter period. Hence the response time of the cooler to the temperature rise of the servers is very critical. Any delay in response will constantly lead to increased temperature and hence the server's failure.

In this paper, the significance of this delay time is understood by performing CFD simulation on different variants of High Density Modules using ANSYS Fluent. It was found out that the delay was becoming longer as the size of the data center increases. But the overload temperature, ie. the temperature rise beyond the set-point became lower with the increase in data center size. The results were common for both the single-row and the double-row model. The causes of the increased delay are accounted and explained in detail manner in this paper.

Many methods of passive flow control rely on changes to surface morphology. Roughening surfaces to induce boundary layer transition to turbulence and in turn delay separation is a powerful approach to lowering drag on bluff bodies. While the influence in broad terms of how roughness and other means of passive flow control to delay separation on bluff bodies is known, basic mechanisms are not well understood. Of particular interest for the current work is understanding the role of surface dimpling on boundary layers. A computational approach is employed and the study has two main goals. The first is to understand and advance the numerical methodology utilized for the computations. The second is to shed some light on the details of how surface dimples distort boundary layers and cause transition to turbulence. Simulations are performed of the flow over a simplified configuration: the flow of a boundary layer over a dimpled flat plate. The flow is modeled using an immersed boundary as a representation of the dimpled surface along with direct numerical simulation of the Navier-Stokes equations. The dimple geometry used is fixed and is that of a spherical depression in the flat plate with a depth-to-diameter ratio of 0.1. The dimples are arranged in staggered rows separated by spacing of the center of the bottom of the dimples by one diameter in both the spanwise and streamwise dimensions. The simulations are conducted for both two and three staggered rows of dimples. Flow variables are normalized at the inlet by the dimple depth and the Reynolds number is specified as 4000 (based on freestream velocity and inlet boundary layer thickness). First and second order statistics show the turbulent boundary layers correlate well to channel flow and flow of a zero pressure gradient flat plate boundary layers in the viscous sublayer and the buffer layer, but deviates further away from the wall. The forcing of transition to turbulence by the dimples is unlike the transition caused by a naturally transitioning flow, a small perturbation such as trip tape in experimental flows, or noise in the inlet condition for computational flows.