Inverse Design Method for Designing Isolated and Wing-Mounted Engine Nacelles

Abstract

Because of the time-consuming process of generating complex block-structured grids and because of the achieved results in the field of computational fluid dynamics methods using arbitrary grids, an inverse design system has been developed that is capable of handling flowfield calculations on arbitrary grids. The flow solver used is the DLR TAU code, a finite volume flow solver for the solution of the Reynolds averaged Navier-Stokes equations on hybrid grids. The inverse design method is based on an iterative residual-correction-type approach to generate a geometry that satisfies a user-prescribed target pressure distribution. The design method has been adapted for the design of isolated and wing-mounted engine nacelles. Results are presented for the inverse design of isolated three-dimensional nacelles and wing-mounted engine nacelles considering the pylon. The baseline aircraft is the DLR ALVAST configuration.