Application of Wray-Agarwal Turbulence Model for Predicting Flow past NACA 0012, 0015, and 0018 Airfoils

Assessing model accuracy is essential to identify areas of improvement in various turbulence models. Flow past several symmetric NACA airfoils, namely NACA 0012, NACA 0015 and NACA 0018 are standard test cases for validating and evaluating turbulence models’ accuracy since the experimental data is available for these airfoils. Available wind tunnel data allows for testing turbulence models’ capability to predict lift, drag, and pressure distributions for angles of attack ranging from-4 to 16 degrees at high Reynolds numbers. In this study, two turbulence models are compared to experimental data for the NACA 0012, 0015, and 0018 airfoils. The two turbulence models are the well-known one equation Spalart-Allmaras (SA) and newly developed Wray-Agarwal (WA) model. Numerical results show that both turbulence models are capable of accurately predicting lift and pressure coefficients but generally over predict drag. However, the WA model exhibits higher accuracy in predicting lift at high angles of attack for two of the airfoils and peak pressure for NACA 0012.