A numerical framework to investigate isotropic turbulent inflow interacting with an airfoil’s leading edge

Abstract

This paper presents a numerical framework to study the interaction of isotropic turbulence with airfoils. Specifically, the developed numerical framework is used to investigate the distortion of the turbulent structures interacting with an airfoil’s leading edge. For turbulence modeling, Large Eddy Simulation (LES) is used. The isotropic turbulent inflow for the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations is synthetically generated using the turbulent digital filter method. The case studied with the numerical framework is a NACA 0012 airfoil with a chord-based Reynolds number of Rec=2×105 and an angle of attack of α=5°. The numerical simulation results are compared to high-speed particle image velocimetry (PIV) measurements performed for a NACA 0012 airfoil at the equivalent chord-based Reynolds number and turbulent inflow conditions. The CFD results of the numerical framework compare well with the experiments in terms of velocity spectra and RMS values upstream of the airfoil’s leading edge. The spectra and correlations of the velocity field generated by the turbulent digital filter demonstrate its ability to generate isotropic turbulent inflow. Instantaneous velocity fields show that the airfoil suppresses large-scale turbulent structures of the incoming turbulent flow. The size of the incoming turbulent structures decreases as they approach the leading edge due to the presence of the airfoil. The pre-multiplied spectra of the different velocity components show that downstream of the airfoil’s leading edge, the turbulent structures are stretched in the streamwise direction. The streamwise turbulent integral length scales and the velocity RMS values upstream of the airfoil’s leading edge indicate that the velocity components most affected by distortion are the streamwise and wall-normal components.