INVESTIGATION OF RAIN EFFECTS ON NACA0012 AIRFOIL WITH OPENFOAM

Abstract

Heavy rain can cause severe aerodynamic performance degradation to airfoil, particularly during take-off and landing stage. Rainfall is considered as an important aircraft safety hazard. To analyse this problem numerically, it is noticed that OpenFOAM provides a powerful platform for simulation of fluid mechanics. On the other hand, it was found that there is no built-in application in OpenFOAM for simulation of rain effect on airfoil that involves complex interactions among droplets, air flow and the structures, which is the focus of the present work. To achieve this aim, we developed an incompressible Eulerian-Lagrangian solver within OpenFOAM framework, named parcelFilmFoam. This solver integrates several OpenFOAM built-in libraries and applications. It is validated against benchmark data first, and then used to investigate aerodynamic performance of NACA0012 airfoil with dry air and heavy rain conditions.