Transonic Tail Buffet Simulations on a Passenger Aircraft
Sebastian Illi, Thorsten Lutz and Ewald Krmer
Institute for Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics, University of Stuttgart, Pfaffenwaldring 21, 70569 Stuttgart
Introduction The effect of the three-dimensional nature of the flow over an aircraft wing in the transonic regime during shock induced stall conditions is relatively poorly understood. The focus of the investigations, which have been conducted at the EPCC during the HPC Europa 2 call in 2012, lay in the simulation of this phenomenon of a common passenger aircraft using the DLR TAU code [1]. The horizontal and vertical tail planes as well as the wing and fuselage of the aircraft were included in this simulation, allowing to simulate the interaction between the turbulent separated structures originating from the main wing and the horizontal tail plane (HTP). The interaction leads to a phenomenon known as tail buffet, and is thought to be able to generate significant load fluctuations on the HTP which can be safety critical. Mesh generation A hybrid mesh has been built by the German Aerospace Center DLR using the mesh generator Centaur. At the Institute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics (University of Stuttgart) a block suitable for Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (DDES) [2] was generated in Gridgen around the expected separated area on the wing. Both meshes were merged via the Chimaera approach. To reduce the mesh size and therefore the computational resources that are required, only a half-model of the airplane was simulated. The large turbulent structures that are created in the vicinity of the shock separation of the wing need to be propagated successfully downstream to the HTP. To achieve this, a highly resolved Cartesian block in the area of the wake was included in the mesh. Performance For optimal performance the graph partitioner Chaco was linked to TAU to guarantee a proper partitioning. To perform scaling test the mesh was split into a large number of domains ranging from 128 up to 8192. Because of the relatively low memory per node and the big mesh size (42 million points) 128 domains was the smallest amount of processors a simulation was able to run on the CRAY XE 6 HECToR. The TAU-Code performs well in a range of 128 to 2048 showing a scaling performance of over 90% based on the results for 128 cores. Beyond this amount of cores the scaling efficiency is still acceptable showing 85% for 4096 and around 70% for 8192 cores but due to limited resources the production job was run on 2048 cores. Results The simulations show a separation of the flow followed by a shock movement in the outer section of the wing. The global force coefficients also indicate this behavior oscillating at the same frequency. The results of the Detached Eddy Simulation and the Spalart Allmaras turbulence model show good accordance. But a clear change in the topology of the turbulent structures can be seen due to the rapid drop in eddy viscosity in the LES area in the wake. While the RANS method preserves large vortices originating in the detached area and influencing the flow in the wake, the DES shows small turbulent structures propagating through the wake to the HTP. The effect of these structures can also be seen in the spectra monitored in the wake and on the surface of the HTP. While the RANS model shows only a little bump in the low frequency domain which is followed by very low amplitudes for the middle and high frequencies, the DDES preserves the spectrum up to its cutoff wave length. Therefore the tail buffet effect in the DES can also be seen more clearly in the variances of the surface pressure distribution on the HTP.
Acknowledgement
The work was carried out under the HPC-EUROPA2 project (project number: 228398) with the support of the European Commission - Capacities Area - Research Infrastructures. This work made use of the facilities of HECToR, the UK's national high-performance computing service, which is provided by UoE HPCx Ltd at the University of Edinburgh, Cray Inc and NAG Ltd, and funded by the Office of Science and Technology through EPSRC's High End Computing Programme.
References
[1] Gerhold, T., Overview of the Hybrid RANS Code TAU, Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Multidisciplinary Design, Vol 89, 81-92, Kroll, N. and Fassbende, J. K., 2005
[2] Spalart, P. R. et al., A new version of detached-eddy simulation, resistant to ambiguous grid densities, Theoretical Computational Fluid Dynamics, 20, 181-195, 2006
Figure 1: Scaling of the DLR-TAU code on HECToR
Figure 2: Turbulence visualizatzion using 2-iso-surfaces in the wake