Airfoil Analysis
This tutorial explains how to analyze an airfoil using high-fidelity aerodynamic analysis. High-fidelity aerodynamic analysis in MACH is done using ADflow. ADflow is a finite-volume CFD solver for cell-centered multi-block and overset meshes. ADflow solves the compressible Euler, laminar Navier–Stokes, and RANS equations with a second-order accurate spatial discretization. More information on ADflow can be found here.
To start, we will go through an example of how to perform an aerodynamic analysis on a NACA 0012 airfoil with ADflow.
In order to analyze an airfoil geometry with ADflow, we need to take the following steps:
- Obtain a set of airfoil coordinates and preprocess them for meshing
The MACH-Aero framework provides the necessary tools to process and manipulate airfoil coordinates. However, the coordinates themselves will need to be sourced, provided, or generated.
- Generate a valid structured mesh
A finite-volume CFD solver like ADflow requires a valid structured volume mesh. For airfoils, we can simply extrude airfoil coodinates using pyHyp to obtain a structured volume mesh. ADflow uses the CGNS mesh format.
- Analyze the flow with ADflow
Since ADflow is a script-based software, it is important to understand the elements of an ADflow runscript. Additionally, there are many settings that can be adjusted to make ADflow perform better for a given case.