NUMERICAL EXPERIMENTAL-STUDY OF A WINGTIP VORTEX IN THE NEAR-FIELD

The near-field behavior of a wingtip vortex flow has been studied comp utationally and experimentally in an interactive fashion, The computat ional approach involved using the method of artificial compressibility to solve the three-dimensional, incompressible, Navier-Stokes equatio ns with experimentally determined boundary conditions and a modified B aldwin-Barth turbulence model. Inaccuracies caused by the finite diffe rence technique, grid resolution, and turbulence modeling have been ex plored. The complete geometry case was computed using 1.5 million grid points and compared with mean velocity measurements on the suction si de of the wing and in the near wake. Good agreement between the comput ed and measured flowfields has been obtained. The velocity distributio n in the vortex core compares to within 3% of the experiment.