Correlation of High- and Mid-Fidelity Ship Airwake Analysis to Experiment
Erk Kurban, Brenden Oates, Marilyn Smith, Juergen Rauleder
Abstract
An evaluation of two simulation techniques applied to ship airwakes is performed and correlated with high-quality wind tunnel measurement data. The objective is to provide further understanding of the flowfield and to evaluate a new cost-effective approach that promises a rapid turnaround so that it can be applied in flight simulators to enhance pilot training and flight safety for shipboard aviation operations. Flowfield results from a high-fidelity, conventional unstructured unsteady Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (uRANS) computational fluid dynamics solver and results from a mid-fidelity and computationally efficient lattice Boltzmann method (LBM) solver are compared to each other and to time-resolved particle image velocimetry (PIV) wind tunnel measurements on the Simple Frigate Shape 2 geometry. Overall, the LBM predictions are very similar to FUN3D and PIV, particularly for the headwind condition, with minor losses in magnitude and flow structural detail. Analysis of yawed ship orientations with respect to winds yields more differences between the LBM and FUN3D, as well as to the experiment, when compared to the headwind condition. Both methods predict the airwake frequency content well when the critical flow features are not spatially offset. The LBM simulations offer computational time savings of several orders of magnitude compared to the unstructured uRANS approach.