CFD modelling of laminar-turbulent transition for airfoils and rotors using the gamma-(Re)over-tilde (theta) model

When predicting the flow over airfoils and rotors, the laminar-turbulent transition process can be important for the aerodynamic performance. Today, the most widespread approach is to use fully turbulent computations, where the transitional process is ignored and the entire boundary layer on the wings or airfoils is handled by the turbulence model. The correlation based transition model has lately shown promising results, and the present paper describes the effort of deriving the two non-public empirical correlations of the model to make the model complete. To verify the model it is applied to flow over a flat plate, flow over the S809 and the NACA63-415 airfoils, flow over a prolate spheroid at zero and thirty degrees angle of attack, and finally to the NREL Phase VI wind turbine rotor for the zero yaw upwind cases from the NREL/NASA Ames wind tunnel test. Copyright © 2009 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.