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By Greg Stuckert, US Aerospace Industry Director
Computational fluid dynamics has a long and illustrious history of development
and use in the aerospace industry. Indeed, many engineers associate CFD
with its well-known application to aerodynamics, namely the calculation
of the lifting force on a wing. However, as methods and resources have
increased in power and ease-of-use, practitioners have expanded the scope
of application beyond the calculation of lift. Today, CFD helps engineers
predict not only lift, but also variational changes in aerodynamic drag
generally, a much more challenging task. Fluent is also finding applications
to many difficult operational problems that, in the past, were too unwieldy
to analyze with computational tools.
In this supplement, we present a small sampling of interesting applications
of FLUENT to aerodynamic design and to the resolution of complex operational
problems:
- The impact of trailing vortices on the safe operation of successive
aircraft taking-off and landing on a runway;
- The prediction of the total lift and drag on a transonic wing-body
configuration tested in several wind-tunnels;
- The design and analysis of a novel aerodynamic configuration similar
to that of a blended wing-body;
- The proper installation of engines on the wings of an aircraft to
avoid problems arising from the operation of thrust
reversers;
- The safe operation of a military helicopter upon firing a missile
whose vplume could impinge on the airframe or
the tail rotor;
- The packaging of electronic components and control unit motors to
provide a suitable thermal environment and
ensure reliable operation;
- The optimization of liquid fuel nozzles used in the aerospace and
power generation industries; and
- Efforts to understand and suppress the noise produced by heavy artillery.
Pressure coefficient contours on the surface and vorticity
magnitude contours on axial slices for a missile outfitted with grid fins,
flying at Mach 1.5 with a 10° canard (front wing) deflection and a 4°
angle of attack. The vorticity contours illustrate the location of the
canard trailing vortices. When planar fins are used at this Mach number
and angle of attack, these vortices interact with the fins and give rise
to an adverse rolling moment for the missile. The missile roll is reduced
when grid fins are used instead of planar fins, because the vortices are
broken up as they interact with the grid fin structure. The flow visualization
was done using EnSight from Computational Engineering International (CEI).
Courtesy of US Army Research Laboratory
"ATK Thiokol Propulsion
engineers have successfully
used FLUENT in a variety of
analyses that support safe
and reliable design and
operation of the ATK family
of solid propellant rocket
motors. Ranging from the
small-scale study of gas flow
in joint gaps with widths that
are a fraction of an inch, to
the analysis of internal motor
flow fields with scales on the
order of several feet, FLUENT
offers a proven and reliable
method for characterizing
flow environments and
providing heat transfer and
structural load boundary
conditions for component
designers."
-Andrew M. Eaton, Ph. D. Supervisor, Gas Dynamics Section
ATK Thiokol Propulsion, USA
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