Anisotropic Volume Meshing: Onera M6 Wing
When meshing aerospace geometries such as wings, propeller blades, or turbine blades, you are required to generate a very fine mesh that adequately captures the curvature of the leading and trailing edges. To help reduce the cell count while maintaining solution accuracy, Simcenter STAR-CCM+ provides an anisotropic meshing option by which you can refine these edges.
The Onera M6 wing was designed by Bernard Monnerie and his colleagues at ONERA in 1972. The wing was used to study three dimensional, high Reynolds number flows with complex phenomena including transonic shocks, shock-boundary layer interaction, and separated flow. Over the years, the wing has developed to become a classic validation case for computational fluid dynamic codes due to the simple geometry, complicated flow physics, and availability of experimental data.
- Free-stream Mach number = 0.8395
- Angle of attack = 3.06 deg
- Reynolds number = 11.72E6
- Mean aerodynamic chord = 0.64607 m
- Free-stream velocity = 291.68 m/s
In this tutorial, you first create a spherical domain where the outer boundaries are set to free-stream boundaries. The tutorial then illustrates how to define the mesh settings, physics models, and boundary conditions, before going on to make comparisons between the numerical and experimental results.
The fluid domain is meshed using the surface remesher, polyhedral mesher, and the advancing layer mesher. To reduce the cell count, the anisotropic meshing option is applied to the leading and trailing edges of the wing.
Once the simulation is complete, you can visualise the lambda shock along the upper surface of the wing caused by the transonic flow conditions. The pressure coefficient plot shows satisfactory agreement with the experimental data.