Advanced Aerodynamic Modelling for Flight Dynamics Applications

A three year project is proposed to make the advances necessary to allow the exploitation of Computational Fluid Dynamics for the simulation of flight. Flight simulation is based on solving Newton's second law of motion for the aircraft which various forces arising from gravity and aerodynamics, Various simplified models are normally used to represent the aerodynamic forces. The generation of these models can require substantial wind tunnel testing. As an alternative it is possible that computer simulation can be used to generate the necessary data if the simulation itself can be made to execute fast enough. The first part of this proposal is to develop and demonstrate a fast method for data set generation, based on a nonlinear frequency domain method for the Euler equations. A nonlinear frequency domain method will be implemented to allow the rapid generation of datasets for current flight dynamics simulations. Further the CFD simulation will be used to directly provide the aerodynamic forces to Newton's second law, allowing a general treatment of the aerodynamic forces without the simplifications which can be inherent in simpler approaches. The directly coupled simulation is however computationally very expensive and is likely to be necessary only for extreme manoeuvres. These two approaches will be evaluated both for moderate and extreme manoeuvres. A dataset from the MoD will be used for initial validation of the CFD predictions, followed by a generic Hawk trainer model and concluding with the proposed FLAVIIR demonstrator vehicle. Close collaboration with flight dynamics experts at Cranfield will be exploited to ensure that the work is compatible with current flight simulation practice and that maximum immediate exploitation of the results of the project is made. The cost of the project is 197,911.