Aircraft Body Simulation

Automated OpenFOAM® methodology of external aerodynamics of the aircraft body

The original requirement of our customer was to provide a CFD simulation of selected variants of the aircraft body for several flight conditions that differ in flow velocity and angle of attack (altogether 64 calculations in total).

Regarding the amount of quite high number of flight modes to be computed, we have prepared an automation of calculations and thereby we have reduced dramatically the time of delivery of results to the customer with no compromises in quality. We have offered to the customer an ideal solution in terms of the ratio of project costs and quality of results. There was assumed steady state solution. A necessary part of project was testing the computational model on turbulence model sensitivity and grid dependence.

We have successfully adopted the methodology from the automotive (external aerodynamics of cars) that was validated on a simpler case from aerospace and compared with the results of measurements from the wind tunnel.