Extended Assessment of Stability and Control Prediction Methods for NATO Air Vehicles: Summary

Abstract

This paper presents cross comparisons and assessments of the aerodynamic results obtained within the North Atlantic Treaty Organization’s Science and Technology Organisation Applied Vehicle Technology-201 Task Group. The results of five participating organizations and six different computational fluid dynamics solvers are compared to the available wind-tunnel data from the German–Dutch Wind Tunnels, and the results were obtained at low subsonic speeds for both static and dynamic cases. The comparisons help to find commonalities and disparities in the computational fluid dynamics predictions of the aerodynamics of a generic unmanned combat aerial vehicle (the stability and control configuration) and point to areas where computational fluid dynamics is challenged by nonlinear aerodynamics flow prediction. These comparisons help to show where the modeling and simulation of novel aircraft platforms in the earliest stages of design development can contribute to a more successful design process by determining difficult nonlinear aerodynamics and helping to change the design before the later stages of the design process.