Comparative Analysis of NURBS and Finite Element Method in Computational Fluid Dynamics Applications: Case Study on NACA 2412 Airfoil Aerodynamics

Abstract

In this research, an attempt was made to employ the Non-Uniform Rational B-Splines (NURBS) method for a challenging computational fluid dynamics (CFD) problem of aerodynamics around NACA 2412 airfoils. The comparison was carried out thoroughly by using the same boundary conditions and geometry, comparing NURBS to standard FEM implementations. Our study was interested in demonstrating the foreseeable functionalities of NURBS for solving complex CFD problems and conducting a comparative effectiveness performance evaluation between them with traditional FEM methodologies.