Numerical Simulation of the F-16XL at Full-Scale Flight Test Conditions Using a Near-Body Off-Body CFD Approach

Abstract

The F-16XL flight vehicle has been used extensively to study the aerodynamics of medium to high-angle-of-attack flight. Flight test data, including surface pressures, is available for a wide range of flight conditions, allowing direct comparison between computational fluid dynamics and fullscale flight data. The most recent comprehensive study, made possible by NASA, was conducted by NATO Task Group AVT-113 and had participants from many different countries. One of the conclusions of the study was that unsteady flow simulations with high-resolution turbulence treatment was necessary to compare well with the high-angle-of-attack flight test data. The current work applies the HPCMP CREATE-AV Kestrel fixed-wing simulation tool to the F-16XL configuration at high-angle-of-attack flight conditions. Kestrel couples a near-body, spatially 2-order solver with an off-body, spatially 3or 5-order solver to achieve a very high-resolution computation of the aerodynamic features of the flow-field. Adaptive mesh refinement (AMR) is also performed in the off-body domain as the solution progresses to maintain the vortical structures away from the body. The resulting simulation data is compared to flight test data, and found to be in very good agreement for this flight condition.