Time to complete: 20 min

Credits required: 1

CFD skill level afterwards: Beginner++

Welcome to this tutorial on running an aerodynamics flow simulation over the NACA0012 airfoil! In this page you will learn:

and we'll point out some interesting features of the Luminary platform along the way. So get ready to dig in and have fun, and we'll get you to to this result in no time:

The NACA 0012 is one of the standard airfoils developed by the U.S. National Advisory Committee for Aeronautics (NASA's precursor) in the 1920s and 1930s. This is one of the "four digit airfoils", where the first digit specifies the airfoil's maximum camber, the second digit the position of that maximum camber, and the last two digits the maximum thickness. Thus the NACA 0012 means an airfoil that is symmetrical with a maximum thickness equal to 12% of its chord length, but this four digit recipe can be used to understand any NACA XXXX airfoil you come across.

Log into the App and navigate to the Projects page, then click New Project in the top-right. In the modal that pops-up you will see a list of Sample Projects organized into sections — full or partially completed Projects that you can simply copy into your workspace. Select the one titled "NACA 0012" in the Case Studies section:

This Sample Project simply has a 2D mesh loaded, as if you had imported a 3rd-party mesh, and nothing else. We will setup the simulation, run it, as well as describe some additional things you may want to try to learn Luminary. Let's get started!

As if we had just uploaded a mesh, you will see the surfaces and volumes of the mesh described in the Geometry Tree. Importantly, we will use these entities (surfaces & volumes) to assign properties of the simulation, so it is important you re familiar with what they refer to.

You can visually explore by clicking the surface names in the Tree and seeing which surfaces highlight in the 3D Viewer, but you can also use Ghost Mode (Transparency mode) to make it easier to visualize specific surfaces as well. The four surfaces of interest are: z_plus, z_minus, airfoil, and farfield, which all enclose a single volume.

Because we have imported a mesh we can visualize the mesh topology (cell sizes and spatial distribution) by rendering the surface with edges - shown below is a side-view of the mesh near the airfoil itself:

Nest a slice and a clip to view just the area in the vicinity of the airfoil.

Click the Zoom to Fit button at the bottom of the 3D Viewer to see the entire domain. It's difficult to view the flow features around the airfoil, so use the clip tool to only look at the area near the airfoil.

In the Geometry panel, hide the airfoil, farfield, z_minus and z_plus surfaces. You'll only be left with the slice.

Next, create the clip:

Set the camera view to the -Z direction and click Zoom to Fit, you should see only the area around the airfoil, as shown below.