Computation of Unsteady Flows Past Aircraft Wings at Low Reynolds Numbers

摘要

Unsteady low-Reynolds-number aerodynamics is fundamentally important to the design and operation of flight vehicles, especially in the emerging technology of Unmanned Aerial Vehicles. Numerical simulation provides an economical way to further understand the flow details. Unfortunately, solving the Navier-Stokes equations for low-Reynolds-number flows in incompressible regimes is made difficult by the lack of an independent evolution equation for the pressure. One way out of this difficulty is to construct the pressure field so as to guarantee the satisfaction of the continuity equation. Although considerable progress has been made, in recent years, to simulate incompressible flows with moving boundaries, many problems, related to the applications of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods to unsteady incompressible aerodynamic and hydrodynamic flows, remain unsolved. The Institute for Aerospace Research of the National Research Council Canada is developing numerical algorithms and extending the in-house CFD code INSflow (Incompressible Navier-Stokes flow solver) to solve unsteady flows in incompressible regimes. This paper reports the current status of the code development and presents numerical results for flows past oscillating wings.