Efficient Engineering Prediction of TurbulentWing Tip Vortex Flows

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.