Numerical calculation of unsteady transonic potential flow over three-dimensional wings with oscillating control surfaces

Abstract

Numerical calculations of the unsteady transonic potential flow over three-dimensional wings with oscillating control surfaces are performed. For this purpose, a new grid system, which is appropriate for solving the control surface problems, is introduced into the computer code USTF3, which solves the unsteady three-dimensional full potential equation by a two-step semi-implicit time-marching technique. To validate the code, the unsteady pressure distributions on the NLR swept tapered wing with an inboard control surface and on the RAE swept tapered wing with a part-span control surface are calculated and compared with those of existing theories and experimental data. The qualitative behaviors of the unsteady pressure distributions due to the control surface oscillation are well predicted by the present method, but some quantitative discrepancies due to the viscous effects in the experiment are observed for supercritical Mach numbers.