Title: Quantification of thermodynamic uncertainties in real gas flows

Authors: P. Cinnella, P.M. Congedo, L. Parussini, V. Pediroda

Addresses: Laboratoire SINUMEF, Arts et Metiers – ParisTech, 151, bd. de l'Hopital, 75013, Paris, France. ' Laboratoire des Ecoulements Geophysiques et Industriels (LEGI), Institut National Polytechnique de Grenoble, 1023 rue de la piscine, Domaine Universitaire, 38400 Saint Martin d'Heres, France. ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica, Universita degli Studi di Trieste via A. Valerio 10 – 34127 Trieste, Italy. ' Dipartimento di Ingegneria Meccanica, Universita degli Studi di Trieste via A. Valerio 10 – 34127 Trieste, Italy

Abstract: A tensorial-expanded chaos collocation method is developed to take into account uncertainties on thermodynamic properties of complex organic substances. Precisely, we analyse the effect of uncertainties introduced by several thermodynamic models on the numerical results provided by a computational fluid dynamics solver for flows of molecularly complex gases close to saturation condition (dense gas flows). The tensorial-expanded chaos collocation method is used to perform both a priori and a posteriori tests on the output data generated by three popular thermodynamic models for dense gases with uncertain input parameters. A priori tests check the sensitivity of each equation of state to uncertain input data via some reference thermodynamic outputs, such as the saturation curve and the critical isotherm. A posteriori tests investigate how uncertainties propagate to the computed field properties and aerodynamic coefficients for a flow around an airfoil placed into a transonic dense gas stream.

Keywords: uncertainty quantification; chaos collocation; real gas; thermodynamic modelling; thermodynamics; dense gas flow; complex organic substances; computational fluid dynamics; CFD; aerodynamic coefficients; airfoils.

DOI: 10.1504/IJESMS.2010.031867

International Journal of Engineering Systems Modelling and Simulation, 2010 Vol.2 No.1/2, pp.12 - 24

Published online: 27 Feb 2010 *

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