On the far-field boundary condition treatment in the framework of aeromechanical computations using ANSYS CFX

Abstract

This numerical study aims at predicting the reflective behavior of different conventional inlet and outlet far-field boundary conditions as well as available non-reflecting boundary conditions (NRBC) implemented in the commercial CFD solver ANSYS CFX. An isolated rotor model of an axial turbine stage with prescribed blade displacement is applied as test case to consider a representative application case, while at the same time provoke an unsteady flow field featuring pronounced flow perturbations in the far-field. Since the reflective behavior of the implemented boundary conditions was found inadequate in the given application case, a zonal treatment of the inlet and outlet far-field, based on a modification of the governing Navier-Stokes equations, is investigated. The applied approach has proven its capability to suppress spurious reflections reliably, while at the same time ensures a preservation of the reference flow conditions within the required domain extensions. The results of a case study considering calculation domains of different spatial extent and different treatments of their respective far-fields suggest variations in the steady flow aerodynamics to be of moderate influence on the predicted aerodynamic damping, while spurious reflections were found to falsify the unsteady aerodynamics considerably.