ANSYS Fluent 3-Dimensional (3D) NACA 0012 Airfoil Turbulence Modeling Tutorial and Validation (2020)

Hey guys, this is a follow-up to my 2-D tutorial. I do everything form importing points, Design Modeler, ANSYS Meshing, and ANSYS Fluent. An extra dimension adds a lot of complexities and can be much more computationally demanding. As a result it is sometimes best to use a turbulent model with wall functions that allows you to start at much higher y+ than 1. For design and meshing, I used body influence and inflation layers to resolve the viscous sublayers. I use the realizable K-Epsilon model with Enhanced Wall Function and it works well for the 0 and 4 degree AoA.

Initially, I accidentally set my reference area to 2m which is the chord length. In reality, the reference area should be chord length * spanwise length. In 2-D, the spanwise is assumed to be 1m deep, but in this 3D case the chord is 2m but the spanwise is 0.5. As a result, its the same reference area as the 2-D video. I still get pretty good results and when I re-did the results, in both CD and CL for these low AoA.

I had to change the velocities because although the reference areas are the same, the Reynolds numbers are not if they were at the same velocities. Reference area is m^2 while characteristic length is m (which as far as I have read is simply the chord length).

Let me know what you guys think.

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