Sebastan I* Transonc Ta Buffet

Thorsten Lutz* Smuatons on a

Ewad Krmer* Passenger Arcraft
lntroduction
The effect of the three-dimensional nature of the flow over an
aircraft wing in the transonic regime during shock induced stall
conditions is relatively poorly understood. The focus of the
investigations, which have been conducted at the EPCC
during the HPC Europa 2 call in 20l2, lay in the simulation of
this phenomenon of a common passenger aircraft using the
DLR TAU code [l]. The horizontal and vertical tail planes as
well as the wing and fuselage of the aircraft were included in
this simulation, allowing to simulate the interaction between
the turbulent separated structures originating from the main
wing and the horizontal tail plane (HTP). The interaction leads
to a phenomenon known as tail buffet, and is thought to be
able to generate significant load fluctuations on the HTP which
can be safety critical.
Mesh generation
A hybrid mesh has been built by the German Aerospace
Center DLR using the mesh generator Centaur. At the lnstitute
of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics (University of Stuttgart) a
block suitable for Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (DDES)
[2] was generated in Gridgen around the expected separated
area on the wing. Both meshes were merged via the
Chimaera approach. To reduce the mesh size and therefore
the computational resources that are required, only a half-
model of the airplane was simulated. The large turbulent
structures that are created in the vicinity of the shock
separation of the wing need to be propagated successfully
downstream to the HTP. To achieve this, a highly resolved
Cartesian block in the area of the wake was included in the
mesh.
Performance
For optimal performance the graph partitioner Chaco was
linked to TAU to guarantee a proper partitioning. To perform
scaling test the mesh was split into a large number of domains
ranging from l28 up to 8l92. Because of the relatively low
memory per node and the big mesh size (42 million points)
l28 domains was the smallest amount of processors a
simulation was able to run on the CRAY XE 6 HECToR. The
TAU-Code performs well in a range of l28 to 2048 showing a
scaling performance of over 90% based on the results for l28
cores. Beyond this amount of cores the scaling efficiency is
still acceptable showing 85% for 4096 and around 70% for
8l92 cores but due to limited resources the production job
was run on 2048 cores.
Results
The simulations show a separation of the flow followed by a
shock movement in the outer section of the wing. The global
force coefficients also indicate this behavior oscillating at the
same frequency. The results of the Detached Eddy Simulation
and the Spalart Allmaras turbulence model show good
accordance. But a clear change in the topology of the
turbulent structures can be seen due to the rapid drop in eddy
viscosity in the LES area in the wake. While the RANS
method preserves large vortices originating in the detached
area and influencing the flow in the wake, the DES shows
small turbulent structures propagating through the wake to the
HTP. The effect of these structures can also be seen in the
spectra monitored in the wake and on the surface of the HTP.
While the RANS model shows only a little bump in the low
frequency domain which is followed by very low amplitudes for
the middle and high frequencies, the DDES preserves the
spectrum up to its cutoff wave length. Therefore the tail buffet
effect in the DES can also be seen more clearly in the
variances of the surface pressure distribution on the HTP.
Acknowledgement
The work was carried out under the HPC-EUROPA2 project
(project number: 228398) with the support of the European
Commission - Capacities Area - Research lnfrastructures.
This work made use of the facilities of HECToR, the UK's
national high-performance computing service, which is
provided by UoE HPCx Ltd at the University of Edinburgh,
Cray lnc and NAG Ltd, and funded by the Office of Science
and Technology through EPSRC's High End Computing
Programme.
References
[l] Gerhold, T., Overview of the Hybrid RANS Code TAU,
Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Multidisciplinary
Design, Vol 89, 8l-92, Kroll, N. and Fassbende, J. K., 2005
[2] Spalart, P. R. et al., A new version of detached-eddy
simulation, resistant to ambiguous grid densities, Theoretical
Computational Fluid Dynamics, 20, l8l-l95, 2006
lnstitute of Aerodynamics and Gas Dynamics, University of Stuttgart, Pfaffenwaldring 2l, 70569 Stuttgart
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