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Dylan Sitarski – Iowa State University

Dylan Sitarski – Iowa State University

Student: Dylan Sitarski, graduate student in Aerospace Engineering

Research Mentor: Dr. Anupam Sharma

Injected Domain Turbulence Generation for Computational Fluid Dynamics

This research aims to apply multiple turbulence generation methods to a plane within the computational domain, rather than at the inlet as is usual. The advantage of this is in its computational efficiency. The efficiency of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulations is greatly affected by the mesh, or grid, on which they are solved. A finer mesh will yield more accurate results but take a significantly longer time to complete. By applying turbulence further in the domain than the inlet (i.e. closer to the airfoil or test body), the mesh can be coarser near the inlet and only be refined where the turbulence is applied. Otherwise, the fine mesh would have to cover the whole domain, as turbulence will quickly dissipate artificially without very small grid sizes. The other purpose of this research is to produce a turbulence generation method which combines existing methods in order to reduce the adaptation distance after the turbulence is injected. Turbulence generated in computational domains require some distance after their injection in order to stabilize and naturalize to the specific flow conditions. This can lengthen computational domains and further slow efficiency. Multiple methods have been shown to reduce this distance, and I plan to implement some of these in my work.

2023-2024, Graduate