Calibration of the Transitional Turbulence Model

Abstract

In the present paper, the turbulent transition model from Langtry and Menter (“Correlation-Based Transition Modeling for Unstructured Parallelized Computational Fluid Dynamics Codes,” AIAA Journal, Vol. 47, No. 12, 2009, pp. 2894–2906) is implemented in the structured finite volume Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes code FANSC and coupled with the shear-stress transport turbulence model. The model is modified and recalibrated to better match experimental results. The local turbulent intensity is replaced with a more consistent turbulent fluctuation representation to avoid nonphysical solutions at the stagnation point that would contaminate the downstream boundary-layer predictions. A calibration is devised by customizing several constants involved in the equation for the intermittency and the destruction term for the turbulent kinetic energy . An optimization algorithm is thus employed to facilitate the calibration on well-known two-dimensional test cases, such as the flat plates of the T3 series and of Schubauer and Klebanoff (“Contributions on the Mechanics of Boundary-Layer Transition,” NACA TN 3489, 1955), as well as the NACA 0012 airfoil. The calibrated model is then validated on the NLF-0416 and S809 airfoil cases that have not been involved in the optimization process.