Numerical Study of Transitional SD7003 Airfoil Interacting with Canonical Upstream Flow Disturbances

The current work reports on the results of high-accuracy two-dimensional and high-fidelity three-dimensional Navier–Stokes simulations of an SD7003 airfoil interacting with canonical upstream flow disturbances at low and moderate Reynolds numbers corresponding to laminar and transitional flow regimes. Three deterministic forms of upstream flow disturbances are considered, including sharp-edge gust, time-harmonic gust, and Taylor vortex models. The results obtained for the airfoil unsteady aerodynamic responses to gust perturbations with variable amplitude and duration are discussed in comparison with results from linearized inviscid incompressible unsteady aerodynamic theory to elucidate the importance of viscous effects in the considered flow regimes. Overall, the investigation reveals that the high-amplitude gust responses correlate well with inviscid theories, which is in contrast to the low-amplitude gust responses that appear to be strongly affected by viscous effects.