High-fidelity simulations of boundary layer transition on an underwater axisymmetric body with stability theory

During the cruise status of an underwater high-speed vehicle, the flow around the vehicle's head typically transitions from a laminar to a turbulent state, triggering flow noise that can interfere with the normal operation of sonar. In order to accurately investigate this flow noise through numerical simulation, a high-fidelity turbulent flow field solution is essential. Common traditional turbulence numerical simulation methods, such as unsteady Reynolds-averaged simulation and large eddy simulation (LES), struggle to capture high-frequency turbulent fluctuations accurately due to their inability to directly resolve small-scale eddy structures, which results in compromising the simulation accuracy of high-frequency flow noise. To address this issue, this paper employs direct numerical simulation (DNS) to achieve high-fidelity resolution of the turbulent flow field, thereby enabling a more accurate assessment of flow noise distribution on the vehicle's surface. Meanwhile, considering significant computational resources required to solve the entire flow field in an underwater high Reynolds number environment, this study also incorporates the fixed transition modeling method and stability theory to confine the DNS computational domain to the vicinity of the transitional zone to improve simulation efficiency. Comparative analysis of flow noise monitoring results in the laminar, transitional, and turbulent zones revealed that the flow noise source in the laminar zone exhibits the lowest amplitude across all frequencies, while the flow noise source in the transitional zone features the highest amplitude, approximately 10 dB higher than that in the turbulent zone. Moreover, significant amplitudes in high-frequency components (above 30 kHz) are detected in both the transition and turbulent zones. Additionally, this study employs LES with the Smagorinsky model to simulate the flow field within the same computational domain as DNS, demonstrating the limitations of the Smagorinsky model-based LES in capturing high-frequency flow noise.