Assessment of Advanced Transport-Equation Turbulence Models for Aircraft Aerodynamic Performance Prediction

For aerodynamic performance prediction of aircraft or aircraft components in the industrial design process, the modelling of the viscous, in particular the turbulent effects is of ever increasing importance. In order to improve the quality of numerical simulations of complex configurations, a more general description of the fluid dynamics as well as high flexibility in relation to the topology of the computation and high numerical efficiency is required. In this study, the performance of one standard and two advanced linear two-equation transport turbulence models for flows around realistic 3-D wing-body and wing-body-pylon-nacelle configurations is analyzed with respect to the accuracy of flow physics representation and the applicability for industrial simulation. It is shown that the advanced k-w models, i.e. the LLR k-w and LEA k-w models, deliver superior results in comparison to the standard Wilcox k-w models, with the same degree of topological flexibility. In terms of additional costs, the new k-w models require less than 25% more computational time than the Wilcox k-w model. Additional issues such as the range of model applicability are discussed