Investigation of Mixed Element Hybrid Grid-Based CFD Methods for Rotorcraft Flow Analysis

Abstract

Accurate first-principles flow prediction is essential to the design and development of rotorcraft, and while current numerical analysis tools can, in theory, model the complete flow field, in practice the accuracy of these tools is limited by various inherent numerical deficiencies. An approach that combines the first-principles physical modeling capability of CFD schemes with the vortex preservation capabilities of Lagrangian vortex methods has been developed recently that controls the numerical diffusion of the rotor wake in a grid-based solver by employing a vorticity-velocity, rather than primitive variable, formulation. Coupling strategies, including variable exchange protocols are evaluated using several unstructured, structured, and Cartesian-grid Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)/Euler CFD solvers. Results obtained with the hybrid grid-based solvers illustrate the capability of this hybrid method to resolve vortex-dominated flow fields with lower cell counts than pure RANS/Euler methods.

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Document Details

Document Type
Technical Report
Publication Date
May 01, 2010
Accession Number
ADA521989

Entities

People

  • Alexander H. Boschitsch
  • C. E. Lynch
  • Glen R. Whitehouse
  • Marilyn J. Smith
  • Richard E. Brown

Tags

Communities of Interest

  • Air Platforms

DTIC Thesaurus Topics

  • Aircrafts
  • Airfoils
  • Airframes
  • Boundary Layer
  • Computational Fluid Dynamics
  • Computational Modeling
  • Computational Science
  • Euler Equations
  • Fluid Dynamics
  • Fluid Flow
  • Mechanical Properties
  • Physics Laboratories
  • Rotary Wing Aircraft
  • Steady State
  • Three Dimensional
  • Two Dimensional
  • Viscous Flow

Fields of Study

  • Physics

Readers

  • Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD)
  • Finite Element Method (FEM) for solving Partial Differential Equations (PDEs)