Computational Study of Erosion Effects on a Triangular Aerofoil's Aerodynamics at Reynolds number of 10,000

Erosion has been shown to affect an aerofoil’s performance at Reynolds numbers O~10^5-10^6, however, there is a lack of literature covering low-Reynolds-number aerofoils O~10^3-10^4. Therefore, we captured the effects of erosion on a triangular aerofoil’s performance at a Re of 10,000 to assess erosion’s impact on low-Re aerofoil robustness in harsh conditions, such as those experienced on Mars. We hypothesized that aerofoil performance, measured through lift and drag coefficients, would be sensitive to erosion location and form. We found that the leading and top edge were the most sensitive to changes, causing an augmentation of the suction surface’s pressure gradient that affected performance more than trailing edge erosion. We further hypothesized that increasing erosion severity would amplify any trends observed. A two-dimensional steady computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulation was created using a k-ω Shear-Stress-Transport (SST) model and a structured mesh with 55,460 cells. Results showed that erosion affects aerodynamic performance, with -35.2% to +23.2% change in lift and -16.0% to +28.8% change in drag across an angle of attack range of -3° to +6°. We found improved lift-to-drag ratios for angles of attack of more than +2° for top-edge erosion. Furthermore, data showed that top edge erosion provided the largest performance enhancement and trailing edge erosion the most performance lost. Aerofoil performance was highly sensitive to erosion location, causing independent trends that were typically amplified by erosion severity. This study showed that aerodynamicists must thoroughly assess the effects of erosion and damage on low-Re aerofoil performance to optimize aerofoil design.