Large Eddy Simulations of High-Lift Common Research Model in the NTF Wind Tunnel at Flight Scale Reynolds Numbers

Immersed boundary Wall-Modeled Large Eddy Simulations (WMLES) of the High-Lift Common Research Model (HL-CRM) at a variety of Reynolds numbers up to a flight Reynolds number of ReMAC = 30 × 106 are performed using grids of sizes up to 2.5 × 109 cells. The simulations attempt to model the flow observed in the recent National Transonic Facility (NTF) wind tunnel at NASA Langley Research Center using the 5.2% scale half-span, floor-mounted model. Preliminary results discussed in the extended abstract suggest that while reasonable grid-convergence is achieved at all three Reynolds numbers studied, systematic differences between the experiment and the simulations still persist for the floor-mounted 5.2% model with simulations predicting a higher CLmax value compared to the experiment. Furthermore, simulations show a strong sensitivity to the model Reynolds number, while the experiment does not. Additional experiments and companion CFD studies utilizing full-span geometry mounting are needed to shed light on this anomalous Reynolds number behavior observed.