High-Fidelity Simulation Aerodynamics Dataset of NACA 0012 and 0021 Airfoils

The repository contains time series data of pressure, viscous and moment forces for the NACA 0012 and 0021 airfoils at angles of attack (AOA), 5, 17, 30, 45, 60 and 90 degrees. The data was generated during the high-fidelity simulations of the airfoils using the open-source CFD code, Nalu-Wind (https://github.com/Exawind/nalu-wind). The research objective was to study the effects of mesh resolution and turbulence model on the three-dimensional deep stall aerodynamics of the airfoils, which has been published in the Journal of Turbulence (https://doi.org/10.1080/14685248.2023.2225141). Several meshes of the O-grid type were generated using the modified Pointwise Glyph script of Carrigan (https://github.com/pointwise/AirfoilMesh) by varying the wall normal and spanwise resolutions. Note that, the geometry was extruded by four chord lengths in the spanwise direction. In the paper, we showed that Improved Delayed Detached Eddy Simulation (IDDES) hybrid RANS/LES turbulence model with a minimum of 24 cells per chord length in the spanwise direction is necessary to correctly predict the loads in the deep stall regime. Under the NACA 0012 airfoil directory, the data for several combinations of wall-normal and spanwise resolutions are presented in each of the AOA subdirectories. The corresponding experimental data for the lift and drag polars can be found in the "exp_data" subdirectory. The directory for the NACA 0021 airfoil consists of CFD force data and airfoil polars for Reynolds numbers 2.7e5 and 2.0e6.     

2 Data Resources
Name Size Type Resource Description History
CFD and experimental dataset for NACA0012 airfoil 14.9 MB Archive It consists of the following subdirectories for each angle of attack (aoa) CFD simulation and experimental data (exp_data): aoa_17/ aoa_30/ aoa_45/ aoa_5/ aoa_60/ aoa_90/ exp_data/
CFD and experimental dataset for NACA0021 airfoil 3.5 MB Archive It consists of CFD and experimental data for Reynolds numbers 2.7E5 and 2.0E6.
Author Information
Shreyas Bidadi, National Laboratory of the Rockies
Ganesh Vijayakumar, National Laboratory of the Rockies
Ashesh Sharma, National Laboratory of the Rockies
Michael Sprague, National Laboratory of the Rockies
Cite This Dataset
Bidadi, Shreyas, Ganesh Vijayakumar, Ashesh Sharma, and Michael Sprague. 2026. "High-Fidelity Simulation Aerodynamics Dataset of NACA 0012 and 0021 Airfoils." NLR Data Catalog. Golden, CO: National Laboratory of the Rockies. Last updated: January 22, 2026. DOI: 10.7799/3014033.
About This Dataset
311
10.7799/3014033
Public
01/22/2026
DOE Project
High Fidelity Modeling Project
Facilities
High Performance Computing Center (HPC)
Funding Organization
Department of Energy (DOE)
Sponsoring Organization
USDOE Office of Energy Efficiency and Renewable Energy (EERE), Renewable Power Office. Wind Energy Technologies Office
Research Areas
Wind Energy
License
View License
Digital Object Identifier
10.7799/3014033