ENGINEERING AND CFD

Wind turbine and aircraft design relies on numerical simulation. Current aerodynamic models represent turbulence not directly but model its averaged impact. Such models are only reliable near the design point and require vast experience of the design engineer. Industry wants therefore to enable more accurate methods, such as wall-modeled Large-Eddy Simulation (wmLES) which represents turbulent flow structures directly. R2Wall provides a high-resolution simulation of the NACA4412 airfoil as reference data for the development of wall-models for LES and turbulence models in general. This project has enabled the definition of guidelines for future computations, and the calibration of wall-models.

Turbulence is pervasive in turbomachinery, and predicting its effect on the flow and performance is a major challenge for CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) tools. RANS (Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes) methods, modelling the averaged impact of turbulence, are currently the industrial standard. Scale-resolving approaches such as DNS (Direct Numerical Simulation) and LES (Large Eddy Simulation) compute either all turbulent structures directly, or only represent the larger, and model the impact of the smallest structures.