Assessment of Turbulence Models for Flow Simulation around a Wind Turbine Airfoil

This investigation focuses on the application of the computationalfluid dynamics tool FLUENT to the study of flows over the NACA63–415 airfoil at various angles of attack. With the aim of selecting themost suitable turbulence model to simulate flow around ice-accretedairfoils, this work concentrates on assessing the prediction capabilitiesof various turbulence models on clean airfoils at the large anglesof attack that cause highly separated flows to occur. The study wasundertaken by conducting simulations with the one-equation Spalart-Allmaras (SA) model, the two-equation RNG k-ϵ and SST k-ω models, and the Reynolds stress model (RSM). Domain discretizationwas carried out using general quadrilateral grids generated withGAMBIT, the FLUENT preprocessing tool. Comparisons were madewith available experimental data