Investigation of aerodynamic characteristics of rarefied flow around NACA 0012 airfoil using DSMC and NS solvers

Abstract In this study, rarefied supersonic and subsonic gas flow around a NACA 0012 airfoil is simulated using both continuum and particle approaches. Navier–Stokes equations subject to the first order slip/jump boundary conditions are solved under the framework of OpenFOAM package. The DSMC solver of the package, i.e., dsmcFoam, has been improved to include a newly presented “simplified Bernoulli trial (SBT)” scheme for inter-molecular collision modeling. The use of SBT collision model permits to obtain accurate results using a much lower number of simulator particles. We considered flow at different angles of attacks and Knudsen numbers at both the subsonic and supersonic regimes. The computed density and surface pressure distributions are compared with the experimental and numerical data and suitable accuracy was observed. We investigate variations of the lift and drag coefficients with the Knudsen number and angle of attack. At low Kn number in supersonic regime, our results for lift coefficient agree well with the linearized theory; however, the deviation starts as soon as the angle of attack goes beyond 15 ° or shock wave forms above the airfoil. Along with this, we have observed that drag coefficient increases with the Kn number increasing. We also investigated the effect of Kn number on the leading edge shock position and structure, drag polar ( C L / C D ) , and slip velocity over the airfoil.