Towards the Investigation of Unsteady Spoiler Aerodynamics

Abstract

Aircraft configurations with deployed control surfaces are increasingly in the limelight of aerodynamic investigations using high-fidelity based Computational Fluid Dynamics to possibly reduce the conservatism in the design process. So far, most applications Focus on static control surface deflections. To close the gap towards future simulations of entire flight maneuvers, including gust encounters, the dynamic motion of the control surfaces and their transient impact on the aircraft configuration need to be taken into account. Hence, extending the application range of its flow solver TAU is of strategic interest for the Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology of the German Aerospace Center (DLR). To support these numerical activities DLR developed a wind tunnel model with an active spoiler. In collaboration with German-Dutch Wind Tunnels, the aerodynamic Performance of this model has been examined in two wind tunnel campaigns in 2016, focusing on static and dynamic spoiler deflections. The present paper gives an overview on the motivation of this work and highlights the experimental setup as well as exemplary results. The data will later be used to further validate the DLR flow solver TAU.