CFD study on NACA 4415 airfoil implementing spherical and sinusoidal Tubercle Leading Edge.

The Humpback whale tubercles have been studied for more than a decade. Tubercle Leading Edge (TLE) effectively reduces the separation bubble size and helps in delaying stall. They are very effective in case of low Reynolds number flows. The current Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study is on NACA...

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Bibliographic Details
Published in:PLOS ONE
Main Authors: S M A Aftab, K A Ahmad
Format: Article in Journal/Newspaper
Language:English
Published: Public Library of Science (PLoS) 2017
Subjects:
R
Q
Online Access:https://doi.org/10.1371/journal.pone.0183456
https://doaj.org/article/799c5087fa254096895ed42a62c7ccf1
Description
Summary:The Humpback whale tubercles have been studied for more than a decade. Tubercle Leading Edge (TLE) effectively reduces the separation bubble size and helps in delaying stall. They are very effective in case of low Reynolds number flows. The current Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) study is on NACA 4415 airfoil, at a Reynolds number 120,000. Two TLE shapes are tested on NACA 4415 airfoil. The tubercle designs implemented on the airfoil are sinusoidal and spherical. A parametric study is also carried out considering three amplitudes (0.025c, 0.05c and 0.075c), the wavelength (0.25c) is fixed. Structured mesh is utilized to generate grid and Transition SST turbulence model is used to capture the flow physics. Results clearly show spherical tubercles outperform sinusoidal tubercles. Furthermore experimental study considering spherical TLE is carried out at Reynolds number 200,000. The experimental results show that spherical TLE improve performance compared to clean airfoil.