Direct numerical simulations of airfoil cascades for the improvement of turbulence models through database generation

Abstract

Direct Numerical Simulations (DNS) of a typical LPT airfoil cascade at a Reynolds number of 120,000 have been carried out with the high-order compressible flow solver Argo developed at Cenaero. The objective of these simulations is to generate highly-refined comprehensive databases in a systematic and reproducible manner, which allows the reconstruction of all terms of the Favre-averaged Navier-Stokes, Reynolds stress, and dissipation equations. These databases can then be exploited to improve the prediction of lower-fidelity approaches such as RANS turbulence models, which allow for an extensive exploration of the design space thanks to their low computational cost. This paper presents a systematic approach for generating such databases. Particular points of interest are the reproducibility of the boundary conditions (e.g. , injection of freestream turbulence) and the completeness of the databases. Comparison between the numerical and experimental results will also be presented as a validation of the numerical setup.