Numerical Simulation of a Pitching NACA 0015 Airfoil in Deep Stall regime: Comparison of Turbulence Models

Abstract

In the present work, the dynamic stall characteristics of a pitching NACA 0015 airfoil undergoing sinusoidal oscillation have been investigated. For this purpose, the open-source CFD package, OpenFOAM, has been used. The objective of this investigation is to assess the capabilities of OpenFOAM to predict deep stall phenomenon using three turbulence models: Spalart-Allmaras, k-$\varepsilon $, and k-$\omega $ SST. It has been also demonstrated the usefulness of the Arbitrary Mesh Interface (AMI) technique for the simulation of these problems compared to other techniques such as time varying boundary conditions that have limitations in the angle of attack range due to computational domain setup considerations. The simulation results have been compared with those of experimental of previous works and it has been found that the k-$\omega $ SST model with $y ^ { + } \lt 1$ gives better predictions of the deep stall characteristics.