Investigation of Aeroelastic Effects of a Circulation Controlled Wing

Abstract

The aeroelastic behavior of the wing of a 100-passenger aircraft under investigation in the Coordinated Research Center SFB 880 is studied. A compressed air jet upstream of the high-lift devices called the Coandă jet enables boundary layer control with delayed flow separation and consequently high lift. Aeroelastic instabilities caused by boundary layer control systems are critical to the aircraft performance. The understanding of cause and effect of these instabilities is of great importance. For analyses, a multilevel approach is pursued using full-scale three-dimensional models and reduced-order models. Both model types use fluid-structure interaction techniques. The full-scale models are used to generate a sized wing structure with realistic mass and stiffness distributions using computational fluid dynamics loads of cruise and landing configuration load cases. A reduced-order model is derived by modal reduction for computationally efficient investigations of multiple flight states. To study local aeroelastic effects and to develop three-dimensional corrections for the reduced-order model, full-scale three-dimensional coupled fluid-structure analyses are investigated. The results show that especially the dynamic behavior of wings with active circulation control may differ significantly from that of conventional wings due to the different aerodynamic behavior caused by the Coandă jet.