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The solution by multigrid techniques of the steady inviscid compressible equations of gas dynamics, the Euler equations is investigated. Steady two dimensional transonic flow over an airfoil section is studied intensively. Most of the material is applicable to three dimensional flow problems of aerodynamic interest.
The Chebyshev spectral collocation method for the Euler gasdynamic equations is described. It is used with shock fitting to compute several two-dimensional gasdynamic flows. Examples include a shock/acoustic wave interaction, a shock/vortex interaction, and the classical blunt-body problem. With shock fitting, the spectral method has a clear advantage over second-order finite differences in that equivalent accuracy can be obtained with far fewer grid points.
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A user's manual which describes the operation of the computer program, GRUMFOIL is presented. The program computes the viscous transonic flow over two dimensional airfoils using a boundary layer type viscid-inviscid interaction approach. The inviscid solution is obtained by a multigrid method for the full potential equation. The boundary layer solution is based on integral entrainment methods.
A numerical investigation of heat and mass transfer in a dissociated laminar boundary layer of air on an isothermal flat plate is carried out for different degrees of cooling of the wall. A finite-difference chemical model is used to study elementary reactions involving NO2 and N2O. The analysis is based on equations of continuity, momentum, energy, conservation and state for the two-dimensional viscous flow of a reacting multicomponent mixtures. Attention is given to the effects of both catalyticity and noncatalyticity of the wall.
The Carousel wind tunnel (CWT) proposed to study aeolian processes aboard a space station consists of two concentric rotating drums. The space between the two drums comprises the wind tunnel test section. Differential rates of rotation of the two drums would provide a wind velocity with respect to either drum surface. Preliminary results of measured velocity profiles made in a CWT prototype indicate that the wall bounded boundary layer profiles are suitable to simulate flat plate turbulent boundary layer flow. The two dimensional flat plate Cartesian coordinate equations of motion of a particle moving through the air are explained. In order to assess the suitability of CWT in the analysis of the trajectories of windblown particles, a series of calculations were conducted comparing cases for gravity with those of zero gravity. Results from the calculations demonstrate that a wind tunnel of the carousel design could be fabricted to operate in a space station environment and that experiments could be conducted which would yield significant results contributing to the understanding of the physics of particle dynamics.
Unsteady interactions of strong concentrated vortices, distributed gusts, and sharp-edged gusts with stationary airfoils were analyzed in two-dimensional transonic flow. A simple and efficient method for introducing such vortical disturbances was implemented in numerical codes that range from inviscid, transonic small-disturbance to thin-layer Navier Stokes. The numerical results demonstrate the large distortions in the overall flow field and in the surface air loads that are produced by various vortical interactions. The results of the different codes are in excellent qualitative agreement, but, as might be expected, the transonic small-disturbance calculations are deficient in the important region near the leading edge.
An improved system for measuring aerodynamic skin friction which uses a dual-laser-beam oil-film interferometer was developed. Improvements in the optical hardware provided equal signal characteristics for each beam and reduced the cost and complexity of the system by replacing polarization rotation by a mirrored prism for separation of the two signals. An automated, objective, data-reduction procedure was implemented to eliminate tedious manual manipulation of the interferometry data records. The present system was intended for use in two-dimensional, incompressible flows over a smooth, level surface without pressure gradient, but the improvements discussed are not limited to this application.
A simulation is presented of the drift of trailing vortices in a cross-wind near the ground by an unsteady, two-dimensional, rotational flow field with a concentration of large vorticity in vortical spots (having a finite but small effective size and finite total strength). The problem is analyzed by a combination of the method of matched asymptotic analyses for the decay of the vortical spots and the Euler solution for the unsteady rotational flow. Using the method of averaging, a special numerical method is developed in which the grid size and time step depend only on the length and velocity scales of the background flow and are independent of the effective core size of a vortical spot. The core size can be much smaller than the grid size, whereas the peak velocity in the core is inversely propertional to the spot size. Numerical results are presented to demonstrate the strong interaction between the trajectories of the vortical spots and the change of the vorticity distribution in the background flow field.
Multigrid acceleration is applied to a flux-split algorithm for solving the Euler equations in two and three dimensions. The basic algorithm is an implicit spatially-split approximate factorization method. The stability of the scheme in comparison to other factorization is examined. Results are presented for two-dimensional airfoil flows and three-dimensional wing flows which demonstrate substantially improved convergence with the multigrid algorithm. An asymptotic spectral radius of 0.89 and 0.93 is attained for a 97 x 17 x 17 wing solution at subcritical and supercritical conditions, respectively.
A PC based image processing system was employed to determine the instantaneous velocity field of a two-dimensional unsteady flow. The flow was visualized using a suspension of seeding particles in water, and a laser sheet for illumination. With a finite time exposure, the particle motion was captured on a photograph as a pattern of streaks. The streak pattern was digitized and processed using various imaging operations, including contrast manipulation, noise cleaning, filtering, statistical differencing, and thresholding. Information concerning the velocity was extracted from the enhanced image by measuring the length and orientation of the individual streaks. The fluid velocities deduced from the randomly distributed particle streaks were interpolated to obtain velocities at uniform grid points. For the interpolation a simple convolution technique with an adaptive Gaussian window was used. The results are compared with a numerical prediction by a Navier-Stokes computation.
An existing two-dimensional, compressible flow, Navier-Stokes computer code, containing a full Reynolds stress turbulence model, was adapted for use as a test bed for assessing and improving turbulence models based on turbulence simulation experiments. To date, the results of using the code in comparison with simulated channel flow and over an oscillating flat plate have shown that the turbulence model used in the code needs improvement for these flows. It is also shown that direct simulation of turbulent flows over a range of Reynolds numbers are needed to guide subsequent improvement of turbulence models.
The interaction between increased knowledge of unsteady separation processes and computational techniques is examined, emphasizing the use of Lagrangian coordinates. Examples include boundary layer solutions of two-dimensional unsteady flows, and separation from rotating and translating spheres. Advances in Lagrangian techniques for the Navier-Stokes equations are illusrated by means of high resolution random-walk computations of the impulsively started circular cylinder.
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A PC based image processing system was employed to determine the instantaneous velocity field of a two-dimensional unsteady flow. The flow was visualized using a suspension of seeding particles in water, and a laser sheet for illumination. With a finite time exposure, the particle motion was captured on a photograph as a pattern of streaks. The streak pattern was digitized and processsed using various imaging operations, including contrast manipulation, noise cleaning, filtering, statistical differencing, and thresholding. Information concerning the velocity was extracted from the enhanced image by measuring the length and orientation of the individual streaks. The fluid velocities deduced from the randomly distributed particle streaks were interpolated to obtain velocities at uniform grid points. For the interpolation a simple convolution technique with an adaptive Gaussian window was used. The results are compared with a numerical prediction by a Navier-Stokes commputation.
Part I of this paper presents airfoil heat transfer data obtained in a rotating turbine model at its design rotor incidence. This portion of the paper presents heat transfer data obtained in the same model for various combinations of Reynolds number and inlet turbulence and for a very wide range of rotor incidence. On the suction surfaces of the first stage airfoils the locations and lengths of transition were influenced by both the inlet turbulence level and the Reynolds number. In addition it was demonstrated that on the first stage pressure surfaces combinations of high Reynolds number and high turbulence can produce heat transfer rates well in excess of two-dimensional turbulent flow. Rotor heat transfer distributions indicate that for relatively small deviations from the design incidence, local changes to the heat transfer distributions were produced on both pressure and suction sides near the stagnation region. For extremely large negative incidence the flow was completely separated from the rotor pressure surface producing very high local heat transfer.
The Carousel Wind Tunnel (CWT) proposed to study aeolian processes aboard a Space Station consists of two concentric rotating drums. The space between the two drums comprises the wind tunnel section. Differential rates of rotation of the two drums would provide a wind velocity with respect to either drum surface. Preliminary results of measured velocity profiles made in a CWT prototype indicate that the wall bounded boundary layer profiles are suitable to simuate flat plate turbulent boundary layer flow. The two dimensional flate plate Cartesian coordinate equations of motion of a particle moving through the air are explained. In order to assess the suitability of CWT in the analysis of the trajectories of windblown particles, a series of calculations were conducted comparing cases for gravity with those of zero gravity. Results from the calculations demonstrate that a wind tunnel of the carousel design could be fabricated to operate in a space station environment and that experiments could be conducted which would yield significant results contributing to the understanding of the physics of particle dynamics.
The numerical scheme used by the present time-accurate FEM numerical method for incompressible Navier-Stokes equations, using primitive variables as the unknowns, is a Crank-Nicholson implicit treatment of all equation terms with central differencing for space derivatives. The introduction of a continuous auxilliary system in pseudo-time, with artificial compressibility, yields the incompressible solution at the advanced time level; time-accurate solutions are thereby obtained for two-dimensional fluid flows in a square cavity, in the cases of both an impulsively starting lid and an oscillating lid.