Development and Correlations of Computational Tools for Transport Airplanes

Project Description

The project’s main objective is to demonstrate the applicability and predictive accuracy of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) in a commercial airplane production environment. It will focus on validations of our CFD tools with known experimental data, as well as testing of new methodology before deployment for production use. This project will enable us to shorten the flow time required to accomplish the necessary simulations to demonstrate our goals. It allows more detailed components, more detailed physics, and more simulations to be included in the computation-result databases. The project will focus on several aspects of airplane aerodynamics, including (but not limited to) unsteady validations of established experimental data, unsteady simulations of thrust reversers to enhance predictive accuracy, a study of grid convergence on a common-research model (CRM) for the 2009 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics (AIAA) Drag Prediction Workshop, exploration of new processes based on an unstructured-grid Navier-Stokes solver for both transonic and high-lift (landing and takeoff) transport configurations, a study of wind tunnel walls and mounting bracket and struts interference and ground effects, transition model and its effects on transonic wing loading, and mesh adaptation for unstructured grids.