Sensitivity analysis of dense gas flow simulations to thermodynamic uncertainties

Abstract

The paper investigates the sensitivity of numerically computed flow fields to uncertainties in thermodynamic models for complex organic fluids. Precisely, the focus is on the propagation of uncertainties introduced by some popular thermodynamic models to the numerical results of a computational fluid dynamics solver for flows of molecularly complex gases close to saturation conditions (dense gas flows). A tensorial-expanded chaos collocation method is used to perform both a priori and a posteriori tests on the output data generated by thermodynamic models for dense gases with uncertain input parameters. A priori tests check the sensitivity of each equation of state to uncertain input data via some reference thermodynamic outputs, such as the saturation curve and the critical isotherm. A posteriori tests investigate how the uncertainties propagate to the computed field properties and aerodynamic coefficients for a flow around an airfoil placed into a transonic dense gas stream. © 2011 American Institute of Physics.