Aerodynamic Data Set Generation for the Experimental Vehicle ReFEx

Abstract

Aerodynamic characterization of vehicles is mandatory to identify their flight en-velope, their controllability behavior and ultimately their shape. During the design process one goal is to efficiently determine the aerodynamic properties for every possible state during the flight. Therefore, the aerodynamic force and moment co-efficients need to be known for all combinations that are expected to occur of ve-locity, orientation, altitude, control surface deflections and dynamic values such as rotation rates. The amount of conditions that need to be evaluated can be re-duced if an independence within these variation parameters is proven. For an aer-odynamic design process via CFD this paper purposes an additional method to reduce the amount of data points. Through the use of the DLR TAU code with an overlapping meshes feature, envelope datasets can be produced for the momen-tum free trimmed state in each flight point. With this starting set, several subsets with parameter variations can be computed. This reduces the amount of simula-tions needed by 65% for the investigated case, the flight experiment ReFEx.