Structured Adaptive Mesh Refinement (SAMR) Algorithms Applied to Rotor Wake Capturing

Structured adaptive meshing strategies aimed to improve the grid quality have a significant potential for enhancement of the flow field predictions without requiring exhaustive computational resources. The current paper discusses the grid issues related to rotor flow computations. An innovative SAMR methodology is developed here in order to accurately predict the wake generated by a hovering rotor. This methodology is applied to an investigation of the UH-60A model rotor. The success of the proposed method is substantiated by the comparison with a baseline hyperbolic grid commonly used for rotor configurations. The numerical results demonstrate the ability of correctly capturing the downstream convection of the tip vortices using relatively coarse meshes (1.3M and 1.8M pts.) by today’s standards. Overall, the grid quality adaption based on the grid control proved to be critical for a reliable prediction of the airloads and the wake.