Aircraft Wake Vortex Simulation and Modeling at the German Aerospace Center (DLR)

Problem

Aircraft landing on the same runway face risk of flying into wake vortex of previous aircraft.

Contribution

• performed 27 wall-resolved large eddy CFD simulations
• simulations on SuperMUC, 512 cores each
• analyzed >3 TBytes data
• legacy Fortran modelling code translated to C++

Outcomes

• light crosswind most hazardous at airports (0.5 w0)
• mechanism of ascent, descent, rebound and decay explained
• C++ code used for real-time vortex prediction onboard aircraft

Publication

Frank Holzäpfel, Nikola Tchipev, and Anton Stephan. Wind Impact on Single Vortices and Counterrotating Vortex Pairs in Ground Proximity. Flow, Turbulence and Combustion, 97(3):829–848, 2016

Official link: springer.com; available from scispace.com.