Aircraft Control Surface Deflection using RBF-based Mesh Deformation

Kurzfassung

In this paper, mesh deformation based on radial basis functions is employed for deflecting aircraft control surfaces. A technique is presented which locally restricts the mesh deformation to the vicinity of the deflecting component and thereby saves computational time. In addition to the data sites consisting of the mesh points on the control surface with known displacements, further data sites are specified, and the centers for the interpolants are selected by means of an adaptive process. Choosing the centers for the displacements in each direction separately, termed sequential uni-variate adaptation, has proven to be superior to the approach with the same centers for all directions. It also permits to impose additional data sites for each direction independently, according to the respective boundary conditions. These techniques are used for the deflection of aileron and horizontal tail of the SDM generic fighter aircraft. By making use of overlapping mesh blocks and allowing in-plane movements on their faces, large control surface deflections are enabled, even if small spanwise gaps between control surface and parent component are modelled.