High-Fidelity Simulations of Transitional Airfoil Interacting with Canonical Upstream Flow Disturbances

The current work reports on a comparison of high-fidelity 3D Navier-Stokes simulations of SD7003 airfoil interacting with canonical upstream flow disturbances against previous high-accuracy 2D simulations conducted for transitional flow regime. Three forms of upstream flow disturbance are considered including 1D and 2D time-harmonic gust, sharp-edge gust, and the Taylor vortex models. Results obtained for the airfoil unsteady aerodynamic responses to time-harmonic and sharp-edge gust perturbations with variable gust amplitude are discussed in comparison with linearized inviscid, incompressible unsteady aerodynamic theory. In addition, analysis of unsteady aerodynamic response for a large highamplitude Taylor vortex impinging on the airfoil is examined. It is shown that the less computationally expensive 2D simulations provide a sufficiently accurate analysis of the unsteady lift responses but fall short in drag and moment predictions.