Numerical study of transitional flow around nlr-7301 airfoil using correlation-based transition model

A computational study of transitional flow around the NLR-7301 airfoil was conducted to demonstrate the validation of γ-Re_θtmodel for prediction of the boundary-layer transition of supercritical airfoil. The NLR-7301 airfoil was selected, as it was a thick supercritical airfoil with a blunt nose. Many wind-tunnel investigations were conducted to provide reliable data for numerical validation. A number of the transitional flows around this airfoil in typical wind-tunnel test conditions were used to validate the performance of the γ-Re_θtmodel in an in-house hybrid unstructured-mesh-based CFD code, which was named HUNS3D. The basic numerical methods involved in solving γ-Re_θt transition model equations in HUNS3D were described in the study. This was followed by the computational results and detailed analysis of boundary transition mechanism.