Quantifying Model Form Uncertainty in RANS Simulation of Wing-Body Junction Flow

Abstract: Wing-body junction flows occur when a boundary layer encounters an airfoil mounted on the surface. The corner flow near the trailing edge is challenging for the linear eddy viscosity Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) models, due to the interaction of two perpendicular boundary layers which leads to highly anisotropic Reynolds stress at the near wall region. Recently, Xiao et al. proposed a physics-informed Bayesian framework to quantify and reduce the model-form uncertainties in RANS simulations by utilizing sparse observation data. In this work, we extend this framework to incorporate the use of wall function in RANS simulations, and apply the extended framework to the RANS simulation of wing-body junction flow. Standard RANS simulations are performed on a 3:2 elliptic nose and NACA0020 tail cylinder joined at their maximum thickness location. Current results show that both the posterior mean velocity and the Reynolds stress anisotropy show better agreement with the experimental data at the corner region near the trailing edge. On the other hand, the prior velocity profiles at the leading edge indicate the restriction of uncertainty space and the performance of the framework at this region is less effective. By perturbing the orientation of Reynolds stress, the uncertainty range of prior velocity profiles at the leading edge covers the experimental data. It indicates that the uncertainty of RANS predicted velocity field is more related to the uncertainty in the orientation of Reynolds stress at the region with rapid change of mean strain rate. The present work not only demonstrates the capability of Bayesian framework in improving the RANS simulation of wing-body junction flow, but also reveals the major source of model-form uncertainty for this flow, which can be useful in assisting RANS modeling.