Modeling of dynamically moving control surfaces for realistic aircraft configurations

Abstract

The design and optimization of aircraft entail the assessment of multidisciplinary phenomena through high-fidelity multidisciplinary simulations. The realization of such simulations requires the modeling of movable control surfaces for realistic configurations based on two approaches: combining mesh deformation with either overset (Chimera) meshes or sliding interfaces. The generation of Chimera meshes, however, is particularly cumbersome for realistic aircraft configurations, while the formulation of a sliding interface method for cell-vertex finite volume codes is nontrivial. Here we further develop the methodology to automatically generate the overlapping regions required by the overset meshes technique to address aircraft configurations with adjacent control surfaces. Moreover, we develop a sliding interface method inherent to CFD codes with a cell-vertex metric. Both the improved methodology for generating overlapping regions and the sliding interface method are tested for steady and unsteady computations with and without mesh deformation. As good results are obtained for all test cases, important progress is achieved in modeling dynamically moving control surfaces for realistic aircraft configurations.