The EUROMESH Project

Abstract

Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) methods are now well established as an integral part of the aerodynamic design process throughout the civil aerospace industry. They have been successfully employed in the wing design for modern civil transport aircraft and executive jets over the last two decades. Some significant increments in wing performance have been associated with the introduction of new CFD methods. The design of the Airbus A310 saw the introduction of double curvature wings into the Airbus family in part through the introduction of transonic small perturbation (TSP) methods. The A330/340 wing was primarily designed with viscous-coupled full potential techniques. The next generation civil transports will be designed using methods both well established and those capable of modelling full aircraft configurations with Euler and Navier-Stokes flow solvers. These new methods will enable adverse aerodynamic interference effects to be designed out from an early stage in the product development through an integrated total aircraft approach. CFD techniques continue to underpin our ability to design aircraft with ever decreasing drag, emitting less pollution and consuming less fuel. In addition, the introduction of various new aerodynamic technologies and design concepts (eg laminar flow for lower drag, low cost for manufacture etc) will rely heavily on CFD to minimise high cost testing or prototyping. For high speed cruise design the traditional approach of designing in the wind tunnel has largely been replaced by design on the supercomputer with checking in the tunnel. This has yealded significant cost and performance benefits. However 3D CFD is not yet able to predict Clmax and so low speed design and optimisation is still carried out experimentaly. Advanced CFD methods have yet to make the same impact on dynamic design issues such as aeroelastic flutter and buffet.