Collaborative study of incipient separation on 53°-swept diamond wing

A systematic analysis of incipient separation and subsequent vortex formation from moderately-swept blunt leading edges is presented for a 53°-swept diamond wing. This work contributes to a collective body of knowledge generated within the multinational NATO/STO AVT-183 Task Group titled “Reliable Prediction of Separated Flow Onset and Progression for Air and Sea Vehicles”. Details of vortex formation are inferred from numerical solutions of two flow solvers after establishing a good correlation of the global flow field and surface pressure distributions with those from wind tunnel measurements. From this, significant and sometimes surprising insights into the nature of incipient separation and part-span vortex formation are derived from the wealth of information available in the computational solutions.