Numerical study of unsteady viscous flow past oscillating airfoil

Accurate simulation of the dynamic stall of an oscillating airfoil is of major importance to wing and wind turbine blade design. However, dynamic stall is complicated and influenced by many factors, such as geometry shape of the airfoil, reduced frequency, etc. The difficulties of simulation are both mathematical (numerical method) and physical (turbulence model). The present paper has introduced a new numerical method (new LU-type scheme and fourth-order higher resolution MUSCL TVD scheme) and q-ω turbulence modelling to calculate the unsteady flowfields of an oscillating NACA0015 airfoil. The test targets include attached flow, light-stall and deep-stall of the airfoil. The calculated results for attached flow and light-stall are in good agreement with those of experiments. The calculated results for deep-stall also show improvement, especially during the downstroke of the oscillation. However, there is still a significant difference between the results of calculation and experiment in the hysteresis curves of the drag coefficient. One reason is that the q-ω turbulence model still has limitations. Another is that the drag coefficient is difficult to measure and the experiments are not reliable.