Use of a boundary element method associated with a particle method to study flow around aerofoils

Abstract

The aim of this research project is to study the two-dimensional, unsteady and incompressible flow around an aerofoil at high Reynolds number flows taking into account the viscous effects of a Newtonian fluid. The numerical technique that will be used is divided in two steps: in the first one, the panel method which is used in the aeronautical industry will be used to obtain the flow potential solution; in the second step, a Lagrangian method, called discrete vortex method, is used to include the viscous effects. The discrete vortex method discretizes the vorticity field and, differently from the Eulerian methods, it does not discretizes the fluid domain; so the vortex method is a mesh free boundary layer model. The purpose of this research project is to study the difficulties present when one works with the panel method associated with the vortex method to study viscous flows around aerodynamic profiles; the use of both methods to study the flow around bluff bodies does not present serious problems. In order to understand and to solve the problems involved on the couppling of the panel method and the vortex method to simulate flows around airfoils, it will be performed many numerical simulations to implement various singularities used by the panel method to discretize the aerodynamic profile. The obtained results will be compared with those available in the literature for Reynolds number in the order of 100,000.