Aircraft Fuel Tank Sloshing CFD Analysis Comparison with RANS and LES Turbulence Models

Description
Fuel sloshing is a source of instability which is acting on entire body of aircrafts under any maneuver that causes acceleration along certain axes. Between certain amounts of volume fractions of tanks, sloshing effects become more significant than filled or empty tanks. Because of the impact amount of sloshing, measurement of body forces on aircraft has to be evaluated and considered as a design parameter of tank interior geometry. In order to evade extreme cost of experimental setup installation and usage of them, detailed 3D CFD calculations can be used to simulate sloshing effects of fuel tanks. Computational cost of the transient regime, two-phase flow, huge amount of solution region volume and highly anisotropic turbulence modeling can be handled with HPC (High Performance Computer) aided runs with 480 cores of Intel Xeon Gold 6348 processor. In order to model flow regions, Siemens NX CAD modeler is used and at calculation step of cases, Siemens StarCCM+ flow solver is used to compute both calculation and post-process steps of analysis. At calculation step, different turbulence models are processed synchronously with same case geometry and inputs. Both Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models and Large Eddy Simulation (LES) models are programmed in order to compare results of forces and moments acting on aircraft body in addition the ullage resolution of fluid phase free surface. After post-processing of cases, comparison of fully modeled RANS models and eddy-resolved LES turbulence models are going to report as a result with transient rendered movie output of case.

Author(s) - ranked in descending order of contribution / as it should appear when published
Kerem Karahan