Numerical Modeling of the Walls Perforation Influence on the Accuracy of Wind Tunnel Experiments Using Two-Dimensional Computational Fluid Dynamics Model

Abstract

The presented work is dedicated to the development of the mathematical model of a closed-type wind tunnel (WT) in a two-dimensional (2D) formulation based on the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) Unsteady Reynolds Averaged Navier Strokes Equations (URANS) method. The influence of the WT walls perforation percentage on the aerodynamic characteristics of the SC1095 (SC is an abbreviation for “supercritical”) airfoil in a wide range of pitch angles from 0 to 28 degrees has been studied. The obtained data are compared with the aerodynamic characteristics of the airfoil in free flow conditions. It is shown that the use of perforation makes it possible to significantly reduce the influence of the wind tunnel walls on the obtained aerodynamic characteristics of the airfoil bringing them closer to the airfoil characteristics under free flow conditions. The developed low resource-intensive 2D CFD WT model can be used to determine the optimal ratio between the walls perforation percentage, the WT test section dimensions, and the experimental model dimensions for various test modes. Support of WT experiments with the help of preliminary parametric studies based on the 2D CFD model could significantly reduce material costs and increase the accuracy of the obtained results.