Development and verification of AeroMech tool for rapid estimation of airplane aerodynamic characteristics during early design stages

Abstract

The aerodynamic characteristics of airplanes (i.e., coefficients and derivatives) are essential for the airplane design and optimization process. Generally, accurate calculations of these characteristics are complex and time-consuming. However, the level of accuracy can be adjusted depending on the design phase, problem complexity, and available time for analysis. Thus, diverse tools ranging from simple analytical methods to complex numerical simulations are used to calculate these characteristics during different design steps. This paper presents an efficient tool to expedite the calculation of the aerodynamic characteristics of airplanes with acceptable accuracy based on a combination of analytical and empirical approaches. The goal is to develop a a program tool (AeroMech) that can be used during the airplane preliminary design steps to rapidly assess a large number of alternative configurations and select the best ones for further detailed analysis. For this, enormous empirical relations that are typically represented in charts are digitized and implemented in the developed tool together with the analytical-empirical equations to facilitate and speed up the calculations. Cessna-182 and Cessna-310 airplanes are selected as two case-studies to verify the developed tool against the most common tools such as Digital DATCOM and XFLR5. Finally, the developed tool is partially validated with the available published experimental data for the case-study airplanes. The results show that the tool is able to predict the aerodynamic characteristics with reasonable accuracy for the preliminary design steps, which saves time and resources in the early design stages.