'American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA)'
Abstract
(AIAA Paper 94-0534), Journal of Aircraft, Vol. 32, No. 3, May-Jun. 1995, pp. 625-630.Compressible steady and unsteady flowfields over a NACA 0012 airfoil at transitional Reynolds numbers are
investigated. Comparisons with recently obtained experimental data are used to evaluate the ability of a numerical
solution based on the compressible thin layer Navier-Stokes approximation, augmented with a transition model,
to simulate transitional flow features. The discretization is obtained with an upwind-biased, factorized, iterative
scheme. Transition onset is estimated using an empirical criterion based on the computed mean flow boundarylayer
quantities. The transition length is computed from an empirical formula. The incorporation of transition
modeling enables the prediction of the experimentally observed leading-edge separation bubbles. Results for
steady airfoil flows at fixed angles of attack and for oscillating airfoils are presented