Published online by Cambridge University Press: 15 April 2002
In this article, we wish to investigate the behavior of a two-layer k - εturbulence model from the mathematical point of view, as this model is useful for the near-wall treatment in numerical simulations.First, we explain the difficulties inherent in themodel. Then, we present a new variable θ that enables the mathematical study. Due to a problem of definition of the turbulentviscosity on the wall boundary, we consider an alternative version of the original equation. We show that some physical aspectsof the model are preserved by the new formulation, and in particular, we show how the physicists can help us to provethe existence of a solution of our problem. Finally, we are interested in the Navier-Stokes equations coupled with the modified turbulencemodel and we show that the alternative model may be preferred to the original one, because of its good properties(existence of a solution of the coupled problems).