Understanding the flow around thin flat plate at shallow incidence can help in the design of airfoils and sails, as well as flexible wing-based micro air vehicles. Although the geometry is simple, the flow is very complex.
In the present work, the flow field is determined with a LES advective subgrid-scale model (f-LES) which directly adds a force to the original equation, instead of a divergent of a subgrid tensor. This force is built to have an advective nature and to damp only the very smallest modes supported by the spatial discretization. The f-LES model was implemented in the open source code OpenFOAM®. The model prediction was evaluated by examining the decaying of homogeneous isotropic turbulence, and comparing with the traditional Smagorinsky and Dynamic Smagorinsky models.
The flow over a plate with Reynolds number equal to 2.13 × 105 and angle of attack of 1° was analyzed. Average velocity and pressure, as well as, second order statistics were compared with available experimental data, presenting reasonable agreement. Coherent structures are visualized, as well as the evolution vortex tubes.
