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ENCIT 2022
19th Brazilian Congress of Thermal Sciences and Engineering
On the use of CFD to investigate the aeroelastic behavior of an airfoil
Submission Author:
Bianca Taís Visoná Carnielo , SP
Co-Authors:
Bianca Taís Visoná Carnielo, ALUISIO PANTALEAO, Douglas Bueno
Presenter: Bianca Taís Visoná Carnielo
doi://10.26678/ABCM.ENCIT2022.CIT22-0519
Abstract
Aeroelasticity is the branch which comprises studies involving interactions between structural and aerodynamic forces, mainly focusing on aerial vehicles. The fluid-structure interactions (FSI) can result in different phenomena to the system’s dynamics, such as flutter, responses to buffeting loads, limit cycle oscillations, and others. Their solution usually requires both fluid and structure modeling. In particular, the FSI solution using CFD (computational fluid dynamics) usually involves several challenges, including mesh movement, strategies for using different coordinate systems, as well as an intermediate structural mesh if the dynamic system is described by few degrees of freedom such as an airfoil. In this sense, the present work comprises aeroelastic simulations considering an airfoil NACA 0012 with two degrees of freedom. Different subsonic flow conditions are considered to investigate the airfoil with pitch and plunge motions. The fluid mesh is obtained by considering 133000 nodes, with refinement close to the airfoil shape to correctly represent the turbulent boundary layer. The structural mesh is developed by using the Finite Element Method, and it is described by a set of rigid elements connected to a single master node placed on the elastic center of the airfoil. The airfoil mass and its inertia are considered concentrated at the center of mass of the profile. The meshes are connected by considering a strategy of interpolation. The solution uses the open source software SU2 supported by the SU2 Foundation, which allows one to couple the computational code with an algorithm written in Python. The results show the system responses for both degrees of freedom for different Mach numbers, in both time and frequency domains. The general behavior is asymptotically stable due to the aerodynamic damping because the structural damping is neglected. The results demonstrate that the employed methodology is suitable for solving this type of fluid structure interaction problem and the approach offers promise for further investigations involving fluid and structure nonlinearities.
Keywords
fluid-structure interaction (FSI), Aeroelasticity, SU2, Computational fluid dynamics (CFD)
