Inlet Mapping of Wingtip Vortices in LES for Wake Vortex Surfing

Wake vortex surfing is an envisioned solution to reduce the fuel consumption for the trailing aircraft in the flight formation. The recent development of wake vortex surfing focuses more on extended formation where the longitudinal separation can go up to a few nautical miles. A higher fidelity model such as LES is necessary to capture the wingtip vortices strength over about 50 wingspans in the downstream, and this increased distance between the leading and trailing aircraft has significantly increased the computational resources to accurately capture the development of wingtip vortices. This paper aims to introduce an alternative modelling technique at the inlet boundary condition by extracting a plane of developed vortices from the initial condition (IC) domain and mapping it onto the inlet boundary of main simulation (MS). This technique reduces the required computational resources for wake vortex surfing simulations, easing the assessment of the aerodynamics performance of trailing aircraft at different positions. Results demonstrate the accuracy in reproducing the vortices and turbulences which are comparable with the single continuous simulation domain.