Aerodynamics and Conceptual Design Studies on an Unmanned Combat Aerial Vehicle Configuration

Abstract

The ability to accurately predict both static and dynamic stability characteristics of air vehicles using computational fluid dynamics methods could revolutionize the air vehicle design process, especially for military air vehicles. A validated computational fluid dynamics capability would significantly reduce the number of ground tests required to verify vehicle concepts and, in general, could eliminate costly vehicle “repair” campaigns required to fix performance anomalies that are not adequately predicted before full-scale vehicle development. This paper outlines the extended integrated experimental and numerical approach to assess the stability and control prediction method capabilities, as well as the design and estimation of the control device effectiveness, for highly swept low observable unmanned combat aerial vehicle configurations. The aim of the AVT-201 Task Group is to provide an assessment of the computational fluid dynamics capabilities using model-scale experiments and transfer this knowledge to real-scale applications.