On the Numerical Simulation of Rapid Spoiler Deflections

Abstract

Spoilers play a vital role in the flight control systems of modern transport aircraft. Because of their efficiency and fast deflection rates, they are widely used to assist in roll control or for gust load alleviation purposes. Simulating the aerodynamic behavior of spoilers still is a challenging task, as deflecting a spoiler always induces flow separation. For that reason an extensive verification and validation (V&V) campaign has been launched at the German Aerospace Center (DLR), with the objective of extending the application range of its in-house flow solver TAU. A comparison to low speed wind tunnel data has proven the feasibility of DLR’s numerical approach to reproduce the pressure distribution along a 2D research configuration with both statically and dynamically deflected spoiler. In a next step and based on these promising V&V results, a purely numerical study has been conducted beyond the so-far wind tunnel conditions, with the objective of further investigating the key influential parameters which govern the transient aerodynamic response due to a deflecting spoiler. Results of that study, in particular for even faster spoiler deflections and at higher Mach and Reynolds numbers, will be presented in this paper.