Presentation
P45 - Optimization of Non-Conventional Airfoils for Martian Rotorcraft with Direct Numerical Simulations Using High-Performance Computing
Presenter
DescriptionDesign of rotorcraft for Mars is challenging due to the very low density and low speed of sound compared to Earth. These conditions require Martian rotor blades to operate in a low-Reynolds-number (1,000 to 10,000 based on chord) compressible flow regime, atypical of conventional, terrestrial helicopters. Non-conventional airfoils with sharp leading edges and flat surfaces show improved performance in such conditions by inducing an unsteady lift mechanism which operates in a compressible transitional/turbulent regime. To optimize these unconventional Martian airfoils, evolutionary algorithms have previously been used. However, they typically require many cost-function evaluations. For this reason, second-order Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS)/ unsteady RANS (URANS) solvers have typically been used because of their relatively low computational cost. However, these solvers can have limited predictive capability when the flow is unsteady and/or transitional. The current work overcomes this limitation by optimizing with high-order accurate direct numerical simulations (DNS) using the compressible flow solver in PyFR (www.pyfr.org). This is made possible due to the capabilities of PyFR and the resources allocated to this project on the Piz Daint supercomputer.
TimeTuesday, June 2719:30 - 21:30 CEST
LocationHall
SessionPoster Session and Reception
Event Type
Poster
