Turbulent round jet CFD analysis with SU2 open source code: from validation to aircraft's exhaust.

Computational fluid dynamics is getting more and more an established reality in nowadays engineering applications involving fluids. Being able to simulate fluids’ behavior in different cases and configurations is an incredibly strong tool that has a big impact on different engineering fields varying from components design to climatic effects. A lot of research is currently based on using CFD software to obtain results in a faster, easier and less expensive way, compared to reproducing the fluids’ behavior in experiments. That is why it becomes very interesting understanding what tools are available in the literature, what’s their current status, how to better adopt them. There are already some well-established CFD codes that are widely adopted for many different applications and that have been intensively developed during the years. However, sometimes they can be really expensive. The whole aim of this work is to evaluate SU2: a new free, open source CFD code developed by Stanford University, for the specific configuration of turbulent round jets. This tool already shows some incredibly interesting capabilities and it has been adopted with success in a wide range of other cases. My intent was to give my contribution to the cause, testing the software current status when dealing with such problems, giving some validation data and also report some issues encountered on the way. The idea is to show potential new users how to adjust the settings so as to obtain results that mostly likely can be considered reliable, but also to give a feedback to the software developers on possible improvements to be performed on the code.