The influence of fixed transition modeling on aeroelastic simulations in comparison to wind tunnel experiments

This paper presents the results from three-dimensional fluid-structure interaction simulations of an aeroelastic wind tunnel experiment which was conducted in the Transonic Wind Tunnel in Göttingen, Germany in 2013. The experimental setup consisted of two wings: a rectangular NACA0010 wing, which was used as a gust generator, and further downstream a three-dimensional elastic wing representing the outer part of a typical transport-aircraft wing, the so-called "Aerostabil" wing. Laminar-turbulent boundary layer transition has been tripped to generate turbulent flow. The investigations in this paper are focused on the numerical influence of fixed transition compared to fully turbulent simulations. The effect of the different aerodynamic modeling becomes most obvious for higher angles of attack. Compared to experimental data, steady simulations of static aeroelastic lift polars show the improvement of the numerical prediction accuracy for coupled simulations with fixed transition modeling. Moreover, unsteady simulations reveal a significant reduction of unsteady loads for simulations with fixed transition compared to fully turbulent simulations.