High-Fidelity Simulations of Airfoil Interaction with Upstream Turbulence

Abstract

This work complements a series of benchmark high-fidelity numerical studies investigating a low-speed airfoil response to canonical forms of impinging flow disturbances characteristic of unsteady urban environment. While previous parametric analyses examined aerodynamic effects induced by incident sharp-edge gust, time-harmonic gust, and Taylor vortex all representing deterministic perturbation models, the current study focuses on modeling airfoil interaction with upstream synthetic turbulence produced based on a random flow generation procedure. A previously introduced highly efficient approach is employed to generate a three-dimensional, divergence-free, convected turbulent velocity field with prescribed integral characteristics by means of a time-dependent momentum source located in an arbitrary region of the computational domain upstream of a solid body. In parametric 2D and 3D numerical studies, imposed and generated turbulence spectra as well as the resulting unsteady aerodynamic responses are examined for a set of parameters characterizing turbulent upstream flow conditions and airfoil loading.