Rotorcraft fuselage and ship airwakes simulations using an immersed boundary method

Abstract

Computational fluid dynamics simulations of a rotorcraft fuselage and ship airwake are conducted using an immersed boundary method in OpenFOAM. The immersed boundary method is coupled with a wall function for high-Reynolds-number flow simulations, and this approach enables a fully automated meshing of complex geometries. Improvements to the immersed boundary method are carried out to enhance the accuracy and computational speed of the solver. The accuracy of the improved wall function is validated on a turbulent flat plate case. The ROBIN-mod7 fuselage is studied for the rotorcraft fuselage simulation, and the SFS1 is investigated in the ship airwakes simulation. Simulation results are validated against both experimental measurements and previously published computational data. The comparison with existing numerical methods has shown that the immersed boundary method produces competitive results as well as good grid convergence.