Open Access

ARTICLE

Efficient Engineering Prediction of Turbulent Wing Tip Vortex Flows

Sung-Eun Kim¹, Shin Hyung Rhee²
1 Naval Surface Warfare Center Carderock Division, W Bethesda, MD, U.S.A.
2 Corresponding author, Dept. of Naval Archi. & Ocean Eng., Research Inst. of Marine Systems Eng., Seoul National Univ., 599 Gwanang-no, Gwanak-gu, Seoul, 151-744, Korea. Email: shr@snu.ac.kr

Computer Modeling in Engineering & Sciences 2010, 62(3), 291-310. https://doi.org/10.3970/cmes.2010.062.291

Abstract

Turbulent flow past a finite wing has been computed to assess the fidelity of modern computational fluid dynamics in predicting tip vortex flows. The efficacy of a feature-adaptive local mesh refinement to resolve the steep gradients in the flow field near the tip vortex is demonstrated. The impact of turbulence modeling is evaluated using several popular eddy viscosity models and a Reynolds stress transport model. The results indicate that the combination of a computational mesh with an adequate resolution, high-order spatial discretization scheme along with the use of advanced turbulence models can predict tip vortex flows with acceptable accuracy.

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Keywords

Tip Vortex, Computational Fluid Dynamics, Mesh Adaptation, Turbulence Modeling.

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