New Approach to Modeling Airfoil Interaction with Upstream Turbulence

Abstract

The current work proposes a new method to introduce an upstream turbulence for high-fidelity numerical simulations of unsteady flow-structure interactions. In particular, the approach to generate a threedimensional, divergence-free, convected perturbation velocity field by prescribing a momentum source in an arbitrary region of the computational domain upstream of a solid body is discussed. It is shown that the method can be efficiently employed in conjunction with the random flow generation (RFG) procedures for numerical analysis of airfoil response to synthetically-generated upstream turbulence with prescribed integral characteristics. Details of the numerical implementation of the method are discussed. Preliminary two-dimensional test studies are conducted to illustrate application of the proposed technique for analysis of the airfoil interaction with convected disturbance fields.