Unstructured Reynolds Stress Model solutions for turbulent flow around a Bell 214ST fuselage

Numerical simulation of high Reynolds number turbulent flow around a Bell 214ST helicopter fuselage is performed using an unstructured mesh. The computations include an application of Reynolds Stress Model (RSM), which consists of coupling the Reynolds transport equations with the Favre averaged Navier-Stokes Equations. The resulting system of 12 coupled, non-linear partial differential equations is solved using PUMA_RSM which is an in-house unstructured grid computational fluid dynamics code written in ANSI C++. In order to reduce the CPU time and memory requirements, parallel processing is applied with the MPI (Message Passing Interface) communication standard. Solutions are performed for an isolated fuselage at three different flow conditions and helicopter with rotors modeled using momentum theory in forward flight. Predicted pressure and drag force correlate well with the wind tunnel data and RSM is proved to be useful for turbulent flow around such a complex geometry.