Validation of Virtual Blade Model in CODA for Efficient Modelling of Aircraft Propellers and Wind Turbine Blades

Abstract

The computational-fluid-dynamics (CFD) software CODA is being developed as part of a collaboration between the French Aerospace Lab (ONERA), the German Aerospace Center (DLR), and Airbus (Tschüter et al., 2022). The CFD suite is modularly integrated as a plugin into the FlowSimulator high-performancecomputing (HPC) ecosystem for multiphysics simulations and includes second-order finite-volume and higherorder discontinuous-Galerkin solvers along with various capabilities for different types of flows and configurations. In this study, the solver is validated for an aircraft propeller and a wind turbine blade, where rotors are modelled using a virtual-blade-model (VBM) plugin. The VBM used in this investigation is based on the original formulation by Zori & Rajagopalan (1995), and a tip loss model by Glauert (1963) is added to the model. Derived from the blade element theory, the VBM utilises a local angle of attack and Mach number at each section of the wing to obtain the load from 2D airfoil lift and drag lookup tables, and the load is converted to the momentum source. This modelling approach allows fast and cost-efficient computations of the rotor performance with reasonable accuracy. Hence, the VBM is targeted to analyse and optimise the performance of complex systems like wind farms or aircraft with distributed propulsion, for which a geometric resolution of the involved rotors quickly becomes prohibitive. In this extended abstract, an aircraft propeller-nacelle test case from Sinnige et al. (2019) is presented. Various advance ratios are simulated, and the performance data are measured and compared to the experimental data. A wind turbine case presenting Enercon E115 3.2MW wind turbine will be discussed in the accompanying presentation.