Transonic drag prediction on a DLR-F6 transport configuration using unstructured grid solvers

A second international AIAA Drag Prediction Workshop (DPW-II) was organized and held in Orlando Florida on June 21–22, 2003. The primary purpose was to investigate the code-to-code uncertainty, address the sensitivity of the drag prediction to grid size and quantify the uncertainty in predicting nacelle/pylon drag increments at a transonic cruise condition. This paper presents an in-depth analysis of the DPW-II computational results from three state-of-the-art unstructured grid Navier-Stokes flow solvers exercised on similar families of tetrahedral grids. The flow solvers are USM3D – a tetrahedral cell-centered upwind solver, FUN3D – a tetrahedral node-centered upwind solver, and NSU3D – a general element node-centered central-differenced solver. Overall, grid refinement did not consistently improve the correlation with experimental data for either the wing/body or the wing/body/nacelle pylon configuration. Although, the range in total drag for the wing/body fine grids was only 5 counts, a code-to-code comparison of surface pressures and surface restricted streamlines indicated that the three solvers were not all converging to the same flow solutions– different shock locations and separation patterns were evident. Similarly, the wing/body/nacelle/pylon solutions did not appear to be converging to the same flow solutions. Although the absolute values of total drag predicted by two of the solvers for the medium and fine grids did not compare well with the experiment, the incremental drag predictions were within ±3 counts of the experimental data. Although, the sources of code-to-code variation in force and moment predictions for the three unstructured grid codes have not yet been identified, the current study reinforces the necessity of applying multiple codes to the same application to assess uncertainty.