Numerical simulation of transonic limit cycle oscillations using high-order low-diffusion schemes

This paper simulates the NLR7301 airfoil limit cycle oscillation (LCO) caused by fluid–structure interaction (FSI) using Reynolds averaged Navier–Stokes equations (RANS) coupled with Spalart–Allmaras (S–A) one-equation turbulence model. A low diffusion E-CUSP (LDE) scheme with 5th order weighted essentially nonoscillatory scheme (WENO) is employed to calculate the inviscid fluxes. A fully conservative 4th order central differencing is used for the viscous terms. A fully coupled fluid–structural interaction model is employed. For the case computed in this paper, the predicted LCO frequency, amplitudes, averaged lift and moment, all agree excellently with the experiment performed by Schewe et al. The solutions appear to have bifurcation and are dependent on the initial fields or initial perturbation. The developed computational fluid dynamics (CFD)/computational structure dynamics (CSD) simulation is able to capture the LCO with very small amplitudes measured in the experiment. This is attributed to the high order low diffusion schemes, fully coupled FSI model, and the turbulence model used. This research appears to be the first time that a numerical simulation of LCO matches the experiment. The simulation confirms several observations of the experiment.