Numerical simulation of thin airfoil stall by using a modified DES approach

The detached‐Eddy simulation (DES) method was applied to calculate pre‐ and post‐stall aerodynamic characteristics of airfoil stall. A discrepancy between numerical and experimental data was observed near the stall regime for the airfoil NACA64_A‐ 006 which is a thin airfoil stall type. The reason of this discrepancy and one possible way for improvement of the numerical model are discussed here. It is shown that the use of the Baldwin–Lomax model in the RANS region improves the DES results in this case. If the relevant factors (grid density, time step, turbulence model, etc.) are appropriately taken into account, the DES approach could reliably predict stall aerodynamical characteristics. Copyright © 2006 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.