Laminar transition over airfoil: Numerical simulation of turbulence models and experiment validation

Abstract

The article reviews the necessity of simulation in laminarization as an important optimization technique in aircraft design. Transition models e.g. k-ω SST with γ-Reθt model and k-kl-ω model are popular in industry and embedded in many optimization framework. The article aims to evaluate their accuracy in laminar transition predicting as well as in evaluating the effect of laminarization, i.e. the extended length of laminar brought by optimization in shape. The object for numerical simulation and experiment validation for laminar transition position predicting are one original airfoil and one laminarized airfoil under Re~2.62 × 106Ma~0.785. The mesh with boundary conditions, the criterion for judging laminar transition, and the method to monitor laminar/turbulence distribution over model surface in wind tunnel experiment are introduced. The result shows that due to many factors, the two models cannot very accurately predict the laminar transition position, but the effect of laminarization can be evaluated quite satisfactorily by the k-ω SST with γ-Reθt model. Therefore, the laminarization applied on three-dimensional aircraft part, e.g. wing, nacelle can be constructed using this model in the future optimization framework of the authors.