Small-Scale Roughness Effects on Laminar Separation

Abstract

In this study an interacting boundary-layer (IBL) algorithm is used to investigate small-scale surface roughness effects on the laminar separation mechanism, where “small-scale” is intended to mean roughness fully contained within the boundary layer. Steady, laminar breakaway separation is computed for two-dimensional flow past a symmetric biconvex airfoil with small-scale roughness elements added to the surface. In this case the flow separation is generated at the trailing edge of a biconvex airfoil, but results are relevant to laminar separation points in general such as that occurring in the leading-edge region. The study is interested primarily in the laminar separation point, and not necessarily the entire bubble and downstream region. The use of the IBL method made it possible to achieve the required fine resolution in areas of interest. For some roughness geometries and flow conditions, up to 15000 grid points (over 4 million total grid points) were used in the streamwise direction to capture the resulting flow physics, which would still be time restrictive with a full Navier–Stokes algorithm. A number of different small-scale roughness configurations were evaluated including variations of roughness height, wavelength, distribution, and geometry. Results from this work show that small-scale roughness can alter the characteristics of the laminar separation point in low-speed flows.