Laminar Flow Control: High Fidelity Modelling of Transition to Turbulence

Investigators

COMAC supervisors and contact details:

Mr Chen Chao

Imperial supervisors and contact details:

Professor Spencer Sherwin
Dr Chris Cantwell
Dr Shahid Mughal

PhD Student:

Mr Ganlin Lyu

Project overview

Understanding the transition to turbulence is essential to enabling greater laminar flow over wings or nacelles which can have the important impact on friction drag reduction. Existing design techniques such as the eN prediction provide a first estimate of the onset of turbulent flow however as we strive to achieve greater efficiency more accurate modelling is required to complement this analysis, particularly when considering surface irregularities such as steps and gaps. In this project we will leverage previous work on transitional flow prediction using the open source, high fidelity, spectral/hp element framework, Nektar++, to demonstrate how this methodology can be applied in the industrial design setting of COMAC to complement their existing CFD design capabilities.