Methods for determination of the unsteady aerodynamic derivatives for transport aircraft configurations

Abstract

The investigations presented in this article are concerned with simulation of unsteady aircraft aerodynamics and thus belong to the research field of experimental and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) for aerospace applications. The calculations are based on the solution of the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations using the finite volume parallel solution algorithm with an unstructured discretization concept (DLR TAU-code). The numerical analysis consists of two parts in order to obtain a more detailed understanding of the unsteady aerodynamical and flight mechanical behaviour of an airplane. For this purpose systematic investigations have been performed with basic configurations which have NACA0012 airfoils (e.g. wing, wing with horizontal tail, wing with vertical tail). The second part of the investigation is the calculation of the dynamic derivatives of a modern transport aircraft configuration (DLR-F12). One objective of this investigation is to adapt the numerical methods for the calculations of dynamic derivatives and to validate the numerical results against wind tunnel data