Experimental and Numerical Investigation of the Flow Topology During Airdrop Operations

Abstract

This paper reviews experimental and numerical simulations of the dropping of simplified cargo supplies from a generic military transport aircraft carried out at DLR. Aiming at developing a well-validated process chain to accurately compute the trajectories and attitudes of airdropped cargo supplies in the proximate vicinity of the aircraft, extensive low-speed wind tunnel tests were conducted as a means to validate the numerical simu- lation. A simulation environment was established, coupling unsteady Navier-Stokes CFD methods with multi-body simulation methods, allowing for the precise computation of the time-dependent aerodynamic and ight mechanic behaviour of an airdropped supply. A comparison of selected results between the numerically simulated airdrop and the wind tunnel data is presented.