The Study of the Lift Coefficient of NACA-0012 Airfoil Subjected to an Incompressible Media by Using the Cartesian Cut Cell Method

Abstract

   In order to shorten product design time, engineers need to create high quality meshes within a few days or hours. Newer automated techniques have been published to tackle this need, the Cartesian Cut Cell is one of them. This study is focused on the effect of different Cut Cell meshing strategies on the accuracy of aerodynamic performance predictions. The method can be described as a methodology in which Cut Cells are applied to the geometry utilizing a process involving rectangular/hexagonal cells on a regular lattice cutting through the geometry. The Cut Cell meshing is a general purpose designed for ANSYS FLUENT, making use of Workbench to construct the airfoil shape and the mesh.  The results obtained for NACA-0012 are computed using two models available in ANSYS FLUENT, namely the Eq. 2 k-ω SST and the Eq. 3 k-kl-ω models. The three-dimensional numerical simulations were created for steady incompressible flow around NACA-0012 shape. Lift coefficient, Boundary layer thickness, mesh expansion ratio, and mesh density variation parameters were investigated. For this application both models produce good lift results. k-kl-ω produce better lift and the results are close to the measured data.  The Cut Cell method showed a very good agreement between Computational Fluid Dynamics results and experimental data. This work illustrated that the Cartesian Cut Cell method has the ability to generate high quality mesh, which captures the details of the viscous boundary layer easily. The future work is to use more sophisticated turbulence models and mesh refinement for air craft wing with flap.