International Science and Technology Journal

In order to shorten product design time, engineers need to create high quality meshes around geometries within a few days or hours. Newer automated meshing techniques have been published in order to tackle this need and the Cartesian Cut Cell is one of them. The present work focused on the effect of different Cut Cell meshing strategies on the accuracy of aerodynamic performance predictions. The Cartesian Cut Cell method can be described as a methodology in which Cut Cells are applied to the geometry utilizing a process involving rectangular/hexagonal cells on a regular lattice cutting through the geometry. Cut Cell Cartesian meshing is a general purpose meshing designed for ANSYS FLUENT, making use of Workbench to construct the airfoil shape and the Cut Cell mesh. The current work results obtained for NACA-0012 are computed using two models available in ANSYS FLUENT, namely k-ω and k-kl-ω models. The three-dimensional numerical simulations were created for steady incompressible flow around NACA-0012 shape. Drag coefficient, Boundary layer thickness, mesh expansion ratio, and mesh density variation parameters were investigated. For this application both models produce good Drag results. k-kl-ω produce better Drag and the results are close to the measured data. The Use of the Cut Cell method showed a good agreement between Computational Fluid Dynamics results and experimental data. This study illustrated that the Cartesian Cut Cell method has the ability to generate high quality mesh, which captures the details of the viscous boundary layer easily. The authors plan to extend their work in the future to use more sophisticated turbulence models and mesh refinement to predict Drag for airfoil with flap.