Unsteady flow past a turbine blade using non-linear two-equation turbulence models

The flow past turbine blades with thick trailing edges is characterized by periodically separating large scale vortices. The failure of two-equation turbulence models to predict the near wake of a turbine blade correctly appears to be mainly due to the inability of accounting properly for the large scale statistics. The investigation presented here should reveal if a time-dependent calculation in conjunction with a linear as well as a non-linear two-equation model can prescribe these flow fields better than a steady state calculation since the large scale vortices are resolved by the numerical scheme and the turbulence model must account only for the small scales.