ADaMant - Modeling flow physics at the borders of the flight envelope

The modeling of turbulent flows using the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)-equations is a key element in highly accurate flow simulations and the standard tool in aviation industries. At the design point of today’s commercial aircraft, RANS models provide the optimal trade-off between efficiency and accuracy. The prediction quality deteriorates towards the border of the flight envelope. Reliable predictions with high accuracy in the flight regime of today’s and future aircraft configurations require a modeling approach that is capable to predict the flow phenomena and their interaction appearing at the borders of the flight envelope. To ensure the applicability in an industrial environment it is necessary to extend the scope of operation of current RANS-models on the one hand and, in regions where the assumptions of the RANS-approach are not valid, to enable turbulence resolving methods by significantly enhancing their efficiency on the other hand. At the borders of the flight envelope it is of particular importance to capture the interaction of different flow phenomena (e.g. laminar-turbulent transition, attached turbulent boundary layers and the separated flow region). In ADaMant, this dependency and mutual interaction of phenomena is addressed. An important goal in ADaMant is the application of extended physical models and their interaction on industrially relevant configurations in collaboration with the users of CFD codes to demonstrate the enhanced capabilities. At the Institute AS, we will perform numerical simulations based on advanced physical modeling for the high-lift configuration of the NASA Common Research Model, where wind tunnel measurements are performed during ADaMant, and evaluate the potential of the improved modeling techniques with respect to accuracy, robustness and efficiency.