| Advisor(s) | Alberto Guardone, Dario Isola, Massimo Biava |
| Expected duration | 6 months (one student) |
| Description | One of the most critical, yet extremely hard to predict, phenomenon for rotors is the so called blade-vortex interaction. In some critical configurations the vortex shed by the tip of a blade impacts on the subsequent one causing a steep variation of the blade loads, thus noise and vibrations. From the computational point of view, the transport of a free vortex within the flowfield is a challenging task due to the intrinsic non-linear nature of the majority of the CFD schemes for compressible aerodynamics. In the attempt to reduce the numerical diffusion, which is responsible of the destruction of the coherent vortical structures, high-order schemes, multi-physics and anti-diffusive methods have been proposed. Amongst these the so-called vorticity confinement method, already implemented in the ROSITA solver, is one of the most popular and it has been extensively studied. The accademic community and the industry has recently put a strong emphasise on the need of efficient and accurate schemes to predict the flowfield around an helicopter. To this purpose at Politecnico di Milano it has been developed a finite-volume solver for the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation of the Euler equations, named Flowmesh, that implements a unique strategy that allows to perform adaptive computations without resorting to any interpolation step. The student will implement a vorticity confinement method in the Flowmesh solver and then run simulations for both 2D and 3D problems. The results will be compared with experiments and with simulations carried out using ROSITA. The student is expected to become active member of the Flowmesh developers team and a strong interaction with the rest of the group is mandatory. Contributions in terms of the development numerical schemes and coding are expected. |
| Required tasks | Implementation of a vorticity confinement procedure in Flowmesh for the steady case. Comparison in the 2D and 3D case with the experimental data and the result by ROSITA. Extension to the ALE framework of the vorticity confinement method. Analysis of the airfoil/vortex interaction problem by means of adaptive grid simulations. |
| Tools and languages | Flowmesh, Gambit, Fortran, Matlab |
| Prerequisites | FEM/FV methods (basic), Fortran (good), CFD (very good) |
| Outcome | Depending on the outcome the student might present the work at an international conference |
| Contacts | Please send an email to Alberto Guardone or Dario Isola, see contacts page. |