Wind tunnel effects on gust-interaction simulations

Large-amplitude flow disturbances, or gusts, can drastically alter the aerodynamic forces on an airfoil and are regularly investigated through wind tunnel (or water tunnel) experiments. The gusts generated in those experiments are often further analyzed using numerical simulations, but usually without fully accounting for the wind tunnel walls or gust generator. The current work investigates the wind tunnel effects on the predicted lift response and flow field using a computational framework that models the viscous flow around the airfoil but treats the tunnel walls and gust generation as inviscid boundary conditions. We apply this model to three examples and compare the predicted gust response with the responses predicted by a free-space viscous model and a classical unsteady aerodynamics model to highlight the wind tunnel effects. We find that the wind tunnel modeling introduces non-negligible effects depending on the airfoil and gust configurations. These effects include the confinement effect of the wind tunnel walls and the triggering of flow separation when it does not occur in the corresponding free-space model. In the last example, we also note that this virtual counterpart of an actual wind tunnel can be paired with experiments through data assimilation to increase the accuracy of the gust response or perform parameter estimation. Graphical abstract