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This paper aims to improve the computational efficiency and to achieve high-order accuracy for the computation of helicopter rotor unsteady flows in forward flight during the industrial preliminary design stage.

The integral arbitrary Lagrangian–Eulerian form of unsteady compressible Navier–Stokes equations with low Mach number preconditioned pseudo time terms based on non-inertial frame of reference undergoing rotating and translating was derived and discretized in the framework of multi-block structured finite volume grid using three types of spatial reconstruction schemes, i.e. the third-order accurate monotonic upwind scheme for conservation laws, the fifth-order accurate weighted essentially non-oscillatory and the fifth-order accurate weighted compact nonlinear schemes.

The results show that the present non-inertial computational method can obtain comparable results with other methods, such as the dynamic overset method, and make sure that the higher-order spatial schemes can significantly improve the tip vortex resolution.

The computational grid used by the present method remained static during the whole unsteady computation process, with only local deformations induced by blade cyclic pitch and other operating motions, which greatly reduced the complexity of grid motion and enhanced the efficiency and robustness.

This study aims to propose an aerodynamic force decomposition which, for the first time, allows for thrust/drag bookkeeping in two-dimensional viscous and unsteady flows. Lamb vector-based far-field methods are used at the scope, and the paper starts with extending recent steady compressible formulas to the unsteady regime.

Exact vortical force formulas are derived considering inertial or non-inertial frames, viscous or inviscid flows, fixed or moving bodies. Numerical applications to a NACA0012 airfoil oscillating in pure plunging motion are illustrated, considering subsonic and transonic flow regimes. The total force accuracy and sensitivity to the control volume size is first analysed, then the axial force is decomposed and results are compared to the inviscid force (thrust) and to the steady force (drag).

Two total axial force decompositions in thrust and drag contributions are proposed, providing satisfactory results. An additional force decomposition is also formulated, which is independent of the arbitrary pole appearing in vortical formulas. Numerical inaccuracies encountered in inertial reference frames are eliminated, and the extended formulation also allows obtaining an accurate force prediction in presence of shock waves.

No thrust/drag bookkeeping methodology was actually available for oscillating airfoils in viscous and compressible flows.

The purpose of this paper is to study a solar thermal system. Solar chimney power plants (SCPPs) produce electrical energy and thermal heat from solar radiation. The thermal study of SCPPs is required, as these solar systems are characterized by high costs.

This study presents a numerical study of unsteady airflow characteristics inside an SCPP. In fact, the generated power of the SCPP depends on environmental conditions. To validate this study, a solar prototype is built in the National School of Engineers of Sfax, University of Sfax, Tunisia, North Africa. The system is mainly composed by a collector, an absorber, a chimney and a turbine. The collector diameter is 2750 mm, the collector roof height is 50 mm, the chimney height is 3,000 mm and the turbine diameter is 150 mm.

The local characteristics of the air flow are presented and analyzed, such as the distribution of the temperature, the magnitude velocity and the total pressure. Analysis confirms that ambient air temperature and solar radiation are important environmental variables for the improvement of solar chimney efficiency.

Although much work has been done to date, it has been noted that the most published works have presented the profiles of air velocity and air temperature in a specific position within the solar setup. However, these profiles could sometimes be misinterpreted. In fact, some researchers did not focus on the distribution of air temperature, air velocity and pressure. These parameters are important to optimize the solar system. Indeed, the most published works deal with a larger prototype, such as the Manzanares prototype. However, it has not found connections between larger and small prototypes of SCPP.

The purpose of this paper is to present a new eddy‐viscosity formulation designed to exhibit a correct response to streamline curvature and flow rotation. The formulation is implemented into a linear k‐ ε turbulence model with a two‐layer near‐wall treatment in a commercial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver.

A simple, robust formula is developed for the eddy‐viscosity that is curvature/rotation sensitive and also satisfies realizability and invariance principles. The new model is tested on several two‐ and three‐dimensional problems, including rotating channel flow, U‐bend flow and internally cooled turbine airfoil conjugate heat transfer. Predictions are compared to those with popular eddy‐viscosity models.

Converged solutions to a variety of turbulent flow problems are obtained with no additional computational expense over existing two‐equation models. In all cases, results with the new model are superior to two other popular k‐ ε model variants, especially for regions in which rapid rotation or strong streamline curvature exists.

The approach adopted here for linear eddy‐viscosity models may be extended in a straightforward manner to non‐linear eddy‐viscosity or explicit algebraic stress models.

The new model is a simple “plug‐in” formula that contains important physics not included in most linear eddy‐viscosity models and is easy to implement in most flow solvers.

The present model for curved and rotating flows is developed without the need for second derivatives of velocity in the formulation, which are known to present difficulties with unstructured meshes.

Turbomachinery, including pumps, are mainly designed to extract/produce energy from/to the flow. A major challenge in the numerical simulation of turbomachinery is the inlet flow rate, which is routinely treated as a known boundary condition for simulation purposes but is properly a dependent output of the solution. As a consequence, the results from numerical simulations may be erroneous due to the incorrect specification of the discharge flow rate. Moreover, the transient behavior of the pumps in their initial states of startup and final states of shutoff phases has not been studied numerically. This paper aims to develop a coupled procedure for calculating the transient inlet flow rate as a part of the solution via application of the control volume method for linear momentum. Large eddy simulation of a four-blade axial hydraulic pump is carried out to calculate the forces at every time step. The sharp interface immersed boundary method is used to resolve the flow around the complex geometry of the propeller, stator and the pipe casing. The effect of the spurious pressure fluctuations, inherent in the sharp interface immersed boundary method, is damped by local time-averaging of the forces. The developed code is validated by comparing the steady-state volumetric flow rate with the experimental data provided by the pump manufacturer. The instantaneous and time-averaged flow fields are also studied to reveal the flow pattern and turbulence characteristics in the pump flow field.

The authors use control volume analysis for linear momentum to simulate the discharge rate as part of the solution in a large eddy simulation of an axial hydraulic pump. The linear momentum balance equation is used to update the inlet flow rate. The sharp interface immersed boundary method with dynamic Smagorinsky sub-grid stress model and a proper wall model is used.

The steady-state volumetric flow rate has been computed and validated by comparing to the flow rate specified by the manufacturer at the simulation conditions, which shows a promising result. The instantaneous and time averaged flow fields are also studied to reveal the flow pattern and turbulence characteristics in the pump flow field.

An approach is proposed for computing the volumetric flow rate as a coupled part of the flow solution, enabling the simulation of turbomachinery at all phases, including the startup/shutdown phase. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, this is the first large eddy simulation of a hydraulic pump to calculate the transient inlet flow rate as a part of the solution rather than specifying it as a fixed boundary condition. The method serves as a numerical framework for simulating problems incorporating complex shapes with moving/stationary parts at all regimes including the transient start-up and shut-down phases.

The artificial compressibility method is used to analyze internal flows in rotating ducts having strong curvature. This study was concerned with the laminar flow of an incompressible Newtonian fluid having constant viscosity in circular and square ducts with a 908 bend. The emphasis of the present simulation is to determine the effect of rotation and through‐flow rate on the fluid physics and friction characteristics in the straight channel and in the curved geometric regions. The Reynolds numbers ranged from 100 to 790 and the Rossby numbers from 0 to 0.4. Coriolis forces arising from rotation produce a non‐symmetric secondary flow in the bend that increases the loss coefficient as compared with the values for non‐rotation. In addition, the wall friction losses in the straight outlet section are increased, and both effects are directly proportional to the Rossby number.

This paper aims to report the study of a fluid buoy system that includes wave effects, with particular emphasis on validating the numerical results with experimental data.

A fluid–solid coupled algorithm is proposed to describe the motion of a rigid buoy under the effects of waves. The Navier–Stokes equations are solved with the open-source finite volume package Code Saturne, in which a free-surface capture technique and equations of motion for the solid are implemented. An ad hoc experiment on a laboratory scale is built. A buoy is placed into a tank partially filled with water; the tank is mounted into a shake table and subjected to controlled motion that promotes waves. The experiment allows for recording the evolution of the free surface at the control points using the ultrasonic sensors and the movement of the buoy by tracking the markers by postprocessing the recorded videos. The numerical results are validated by comparison with the experimental data.

The implemented free-surface technique, developed within the framework of the finite-volume method, is validated. The best-obtained agreement is for small amplitudes compatible with the waves evolving under deep-water conditions. Second, the algorithm proposed to describe rigid-body motion, including wave analysis, is validated. The numerical body motion and wave pattern satisfactorily matched the experimental data. The complete 3D proposed model can realistically describe buoy motions under the effects of stationary waves.

The novel aspects of this study encompass the implementation of a fluid–structure interaction strategy to describe rigid-body motion, including wave effects in a finite-volume context, and the reported free-surface and buoy position measurements from experiments. To the best of the authors’ knowledge, the numerical strategy, the validation of the computed results and the experimental data are all original contributions of this work.

This paper analyses numerically the effects of sinusoidal g—jitter on the fluid dynamics of, and mass transfer in, annular liquid jets. It is shown that the pressure and volume of the gases enclosed by the jet, the gas concentration at the jet’s inner interface, and the mass absorption rates at the jet’s inner and outer interfaces are sinusoidal functions of time which have the same frequency as that of the g—jitter. The amplitude of these oscillations increases and decreases, respectively, as the amplitude and frequency, respectively, of the g—jitter is increased. The pressure coefficient and the gas concentration at the jet’s inner interface are in phase with the applied g—jitter and the amplitude of their oscillations increases almost linearly with the amplitude of the g—jitter. The mass absorption rates at the jet’s inner and outer interfaces exhibit a phase lag with respect to the g—jitter.

This study is concerned with developing laminar flow of an incompressible, Newtonian fluid, having constant viscosity, rotating in circular and rectangular ducts that contain a 180° bend. The Reynolds number ranges from 100 to 400, the rotation number from 0 to 0.4, and the Dean number from 66 to 264. Positive and negative rotation modes are considered. The artificial compressibility method is used for the numerical calculations and new boundary conditions are developed for these flows. It is shown that rotation causes the secondary flow to occur in ducts of any geometry, and that the strength of the secondary flow in the bend due to both rotation and curvature decreases as compared to the no rotation case.

The purpose of this paper is to present the methodology that was used to perform system identification of a dynamically unstable tilt-rotor from flight test data. The method incorporated wavelet transform into the maximum likelihood principle formulation, emphasizing both time and frequency responses. Using wavelets allowed to additionally filter noise in the data, and this increased the estimation quality. This approach did not require measurement and process noise modeling in contrast to the Kalman filter usage for parameter estimation.

In the study, lateral-directional stability and control derivatives of an unstable tiltrotor in hover were estimated. This was performed by applying the maximum likelihood output error method. The estimated model response was decomposed using the Mallat pyramid and matched to wavelet coefficients obtained directly from measurements. In addition, a coherence-based weighting function was used to put more emphasis on the most reliable data. For comparison, the same set of data was used to identify a model with the same structure using the maximum likelihood principle with an incorporated Kalman filter.

It was found that maximum likelihood principle and wavelet transform allowed for estimating aerodynamic coefficients of a dynamically unstable aircraft. The estimation was performed with high accuracy.

The designed method can be used for system identification of unstable aircraft and when additional noise is present (e.g. when noise due to turbulence was observable during the flight test or higher noise levels were present in the sensors data).

The paper presents verification of a wavelet-based maximum likelihood principle output error method using flight test data.