Spalart–Allmaras model apparent transition and RANS simulations of laminar separation bubbles on airfoils

The present paper deals with the Reynolds Averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) simulation of Laminar Separation Bubble (LSB). This phenomenon is of large interest in several engineering fields, such as the study of wind turbines, unmanned aerial vehicles (UAV) and micro-air vehicles (MAV) characterized by a low operating Reynolds number. In such contexts a laminar boundary layer separation followed by a turbulent transition and afterwards by a turbulent reattachment may appear in the flow-field. The main novelty of this work is that an almost standard Spalart–Allmaras (SA) model, without additional equations for transition modeling, was successfully employed. The result achieved is very surprising being the model not developed for this purpose, but for fully-turbulent flows or for cases with imposed transition location. This result is of large interest, since the SA model is widely used in commercial, open-source and research codes. However, our approach cannot be advocated to predict natural transition within an attached boundary layer, indeed it is only able to deal with transitions triggered by a separated flow. The reliability and accuracy of our approach are here proved computing, by means of a high-order Discontinuous Galerkin (DG) incompressible solver, the flow-field over two airfoils at different flow regimes showing the formation of a LSB