Injection of non-Newtonian fluids to improve the hydrofoil performance

In this project, a new approach has been introduced to improve the efficiency of a hydrofoil by increasing its lift and reducing its drag. Here, non-Newtonian fluids including the Power-law, Carreau, Cross, Ellis, and Prandtl-Eyring are employed to control the boundary layer by adding additional momentum to the sublayers to postpone the separation. Increasing the stall angle and consequently changing the behaviour of the hydrofoil in the deep stall is the main features of this active flow control method. Ansys Fluent is used to study different kinds of non-Newtonian fluids wherein the hybrid quadrilateral-triangular grid is generated using ICEM. The Volume of Fluid (VOF) is used to capture the interface of two fluids. New non-Newtonian fluids that are not available in Ansys Fluent is also formulated and entered to the software through User-Defined Function (UDF) written in C. After identifying the best non-Newtonian fluid, numerical simulations have been performed. The effects of injecting non-Newtonian fluids are also compared against injected water. Indications are that this idea introduced works well and is an alternative for active flow control methods. Results obtained are also analysed using postprocessing tools in Ansys Fluent and Tecplot as well. Details of the conducted project is given in this document.

Numerical resuls