Detached eddy simulation of an aircraft jet flow using an open-source CFD code

This thesis is a preliminary work of the project "High-performance computing and data-driven modeling of aircraft contrails" granted by the US NFS (National Science Foundation) and with PI Prof. Roberto Paoli of the Illinois University of Chicago (UIC). In the work is analized the Jet Phase of the contrail formation without considering soot particles exiting from the aircraft engine; whose drain nozzle geometry has been considered similar to the NASA acoustic research nozzle ARN-2. The fluid dynamic study is performed using only open source softwares, in particular Gmsh for the mesh generation and OpenFOAM as CFD code. Diffrent geometries and turbulence models are explored, with a great attention on the results obtained with the Detached Eddy Simulations based on the k -omega SST model. Furthermore, in the thesis are described in detail all the settings to properly set up the OpenFOAM's solver rhoPimpleFoam for jet flows at sonic conditions, therefore the second aim of the work is to give to the intrested user a comprehensive guide to launch an OpenFOAM simulation for this kind of flows.