Inviscid Computation of Effect of Wake Vortices on a Scale-Model Airplane

Abstract

Within the EU-project WAVENC the block structured DLR-FLOWer code has been applied to the inviscid simulation of a wake vortex encounter of a generic aircraft. The incoming vortices of the preceding aircraft are prescribed at the inflow boundary of the computational domain. This allows to capture a mutual interaction between aircraft and incoming vortices. In order to transport the vortices without too big numerical losses from the inflow boundary to the aircraft, very fine Cartesian grids, so-called "vortex transport meshes", have been embedded into the grid structure. This is enabled by the Chimera technique implemented in the code. One main advantage of this strategy is, that no remeshing is needed to perform a parametric study of the aircrafts position relative to the incoming vortices. Global forces and moments as well as pressure distributions obtained for different positions of the aircraft in the vortex disturbed flowfield show a good agreement to experimental data.