Meshing strategy for movable control surfaces: towards high-fidelity flight maneuver simulations

Abstract

High-fidelity flight maneuver simulations are crucial for the development of realistic digital aircraft models. However, such simulations are still hampered by difficulties in modeling the relative body motion between control and lifting surfaces when using realistic configurations. The presence of spanwise gaps between lifting and control surfaces impedes the application of concepts such as mesh deformation, and hampers the usage of mesh deformation combined with the overset method since the mesh generation process is particularly cumbersome. To reduce the user effort to create overset meshes, we have developed a methodology to automatically create overlapping regions for matching block interfaces. Hence, the usage of the overset method combined with mesh deformation for modeling moving control surfaces is facilitated, and a significant advance towards the computation of high-fidelity flight maneuvers is achieved.