Numerical simulation of flow around the NREL S826 airfoil at moderate Reynolds number using delayed detached Eddy simulation (DDES)

Turbulent flow at Reynolds numbers 5 · 10 4 to 10 6 around the NREL S826 airfoil used for wind turbine blades is simulated using delayed detached eddy simulation (DDES). The 3D domain is built as a replica of the low speed wind tunnel at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU) with the wind tunnel walls considered as slip walls. The subgrid turbulent kinetic energy is used to model the sub-grid scale in the large eddy simulation (LES) part of DDES. Different Reynoldsaveraged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models are tested in ANSYS Fluent. The realizable k - ∈ model as the RANS model in DDES is found to yield the best agreement of simulated pressure distributions with the experimental data both from NTNU and the Technical University of Denmark (DTU), the latter for a shorter spanwise domain. The present DDES results are in excellent agreement with LES results from DTU. Since DDES requires much fewer cells in the RANS region near the wing surface than LES, DDES is computationally much more efficient than LES. Whereas DDES is able to predict lift and drag in close agreement with experiment up to stall, pure 2D RANS simulations fail near stall. After testing different numerical settings, time step sizes and grids for DDES, a Reynolds number study is conducted. Near stall, separated flow structures, so-called stall cells, are observed in the DDES results.