Improvement of Computational Results of NASA Airliner Model by Wing Modal Analysis

Abstract

The NASA Common Research Model of an airliner was used for the evaluation of the effect of aeroelasticity on aerodynamic forces and local flowfield. A computational fluid dynamics analysis of the rigid model showed large differences between the computational and experimental data. It was observed that the model (in particular, the wing) deformation has a significant effect on the aerodynamic characteristics. Online mesh deformation on the basis of wing modal analysis was used to improve the accuracy of the computational results. Twenty modes in total were used during coupled simulations. The results from these simulations showed that adding the wing deformation into the computational fluid dynamics simulation improved the accuracy of obtained aerodynamic coefficients. The same methodology was applied to the full-model configuration considering the deformation of all parts of the model. The results from the computational fluid dynamics analyses with online mesh deformation of the semispan and full model are the focus of this paper.