Reliable Predication of Performance of High Lift Systems Of Commercial Aircraft

Project Description

In order to achieve needed lift characteristics at low speed, commercial aircraft make use of a variety of configuration modifications to the basic cruise aircraft. These include deployment of additional lifting elements (slats and flaps), closely coupled to the main wing, as well as other configuration perturbations to augment the total lift of the configuration (CLmax) while maintaining stability in flight. The design problem for the high lift system is to determine appropriate parameters that characterize the relationships among these components in order to achieve a given performance target, subject to weight, cost and other constraints on the problem. Current design systems make use of both computational (at this stage, mainly two-dimensional) and experimental modeling techniques to bound or determine the set of parameters that characterize the system. The determination of the set of parameters is often done through a process of approximating the system in terms of a response surface for the purposes of constrained optimization. As in the case of two dimensions, it is imperative that a robust analysis capability (residual converged and grid-converged) be developed and validated over a wide variety of test cases before it can be used in the design mode.