Numerical Simulation of an Integrated Propeller with Models of Progressively Increasing Fidelity

Several significant aerospace industry trends are leading to an increased importance of propeller-driven aircraft and rotorcraft, providing the motivation for the recent inaugural Workshop on Integrated Propeller Performance (WIPP) to address a gap in the various workshops for aerospace CFD code comparisons and validations that have been conducted for many years. The 1st WIPP has provided the impetus for a follow-on study to assess the cost versus accuracy of various models available in the ANSYS suite of CFD codes for the simulation of propellers and rotors. Four models of increasing complexity and fidelity are evaluated, from simple actuator disks to transient sliding meshes incorporating the full propeller geometry and its motion. The results show that two of the models investigated produce accurate results, albeit with significant variations in computational cost, one requires external information and therefore is not self-contained, and another is sensitive to specific simulation model configurations.