Double-decoupled inverse design of natural laminar flow nacelle under transonic conditions

Abstract

The inverse design based on the pressure distribution is an essential approach to realize the improvement of Natural Laminar Flow (NLF) performance for nacelles. However, the direct definition of target pressure distribution at design point is challenging for the dilemma to consider the constraints of shock wave and laminar flow at the same time. In addition, the universality of method will be limited when the inverse design is strongly coupled with the solver. Thus, a double-decoupled methodology based on the relationship of pressure distributions between design and off-design points is proposed in this paper, which realizes the decoupling of constraints in shock wave and laminar flow on target pressure distribution as well as the decoupling of flow field solution and inverse design method. Aimed at an isolated flow-through-nacelle of high bypass ratio, the target pressure distribution with appropriate favorable gradient and shock-free feature is defined according to physical principles at the off-design point of Ma = 0.80 while the transonic and laminar performance are examined at the design point of Ma = 0.85. The solution of flow field is based on γ-Reθ transition model and the inverse design is based on residual-correction method. With the inverse design starting from off-design point, the performance of shock wave and laminar flow at design point are both improved. The local shock wave after the lip of nacelle is eliminated effectively while the streamwise length of laminar flow region is doubled and exceeds to 30% of the chord length. The percentage of drag reduction for outboard surface is 12.7% for friction drag, 7.8% for pressure drag and 10.5% for total drag. The effects of inverse design on the process of transition are analyzed with detailed flow features. The robustness of laminar flow is examined under different variation factors of freestream which are deviated from the design point.