Multi-fidelity aerodynamic methods for the analysis of propeller wing interaction

Abstract

The propeller-wing aerodynamic interaction is investigated with multi-fidelity methods including Lifting Line Method (LLM), Surface Panel Method (SPM), and Vortex Particle Method(VPM). High-fidelity results from in-house unsteady RANS computations and experiments are used as a reference. Two open-source codes Flow Unsteady and DUST are used to carry out lowto mid fidelity simulations. For the computations performed with FlowUnsteady, the lifting surfaces are modeled using actuator line model or actuator surface model, while the propeller wake and wing wake are modeled using a reformulated VPM. With DUST, the lifting surfaces are modelled using surface panels and the wake is modelled by classic VPM. A clean wing, an isolated beaver propeller and a wing-mounted propeller are used as benchmarks for comparing the performance of the faster methods with uRANS and experiments. For simpler test cases such as the clean wing, a comparable accuracy is found for the prescribed wake and VPM wake, while the simulation time of the former is orders of magnitude lower than the latter. For the isolated propeller, the LLM that couples with VPM wake can predict thrust coefficient in the order of 10 minutes with less than 5% deviation compared to experiment data, while with high fidelity uRANS, more than 20 hours are needed. When the wing wake and propeller wake interaction is expected to have an impact on lift, drag and pressure distribution, the middle-fidelity VPM recovers much of the physics lost with lower fidelity methods, yet providing a good compromise between computational costs and accuracy.

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ORCID for Andrea Da Ronch: orcid.org/0000-0001-7428-6935

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