Abstract:
A high-order upwind scheme was developed to capture vortex wake of a helicopter rotor in hover based on chimera grids. An improved fifth-order weighted essentially non-oscillatory (WENO) scheme was adopted to interpolate higher-order left and right states across a cell interface with the Roe Riemann solver updating inviscid flux, and was compared with the monotone upwind scheme for scalar conservation laws (MUSCL). For profitably capturing the wake and enforcing period boundary condition, the computation regions of flows were discretized by using structured chimera grids composed of a fine rotor grid and a cylindrical background grid. In the background grid, the mesh cells located in the wake regions were refined after the solution reaches an approximate convergence. The optimized cylindrical mesh was attained by three remeshings. Considering the interpolation characteristic of WENO scheme, three layers of hole boundary and interpolation boundary were searched. The performance of the schemes was investigated in a transonic flow and a subsonic flow around hovering rotor. The results reveal that the present approach has the great capabilities to capture the vortex wake with high resolution, and WENO scheme has much lower numerical dissipation in comparison with MUSCL scheme.