Advanced Wake Turbulence Modeling for Naval CFD Applications

Predicting the high Reynolds number viscous turbulent flow around realistic aircraft, rotorcraft and ship geometries with CFD is time consuming and computationally expensive, with the number of cells required to resolve the flow driving the computational cost. Even with modern CFD methods, the cost of adequately resolved solutions is prohibitive for most engineering tasks. The team of Continuum Dynamics, Inc., University of Michigan and Georgia Institute of Technology proposes the development of a novel efficient high fidelity method for improved turbulence modelling directly interfaced with DoD/Navy CFD that builds upon prior and ongoing work in turbulence modelling, unsteady viscous CFD, alternate formulations of the Navier Stokes equations and overset methods. Based on this related work it is anticipated that the proposed technology, through improved resolution of small scale vortical structures on coarser grids, will have at least a two order of magnitude improvement in computational cost when compared to contemporary methods. Phase I saw the development and demonstration of the core high-risk, but high-payoff, technologies to establish proof-of-concept. Phase II will focus on the formal interfacing, debugging and testing of the proposed tool along with transition to the Navy.