Numerical Spoiler Wake Investigations at the Borders of the Flight Envelope

Abstract

A numerical feasibility study for a generic transport aircraft configuration with retracted and deployed spoilers is presented in this paper. In a first attempt, steady RANS methods using the one-equation Spalart-Allmaras, the two-equation Menter kw-SST and the SSG/LRR-w Reynolds stress models have been applied to assess the suitability of the current approach in challenging flow conditions. The influence of the spoiler wake on the load distribution of the horizontal tail plane is investigated and a grid convergence study is carried out to verify the results. The influence of a grid adaptation to better capture the influence of the vortical flow of the spoiler wake is evaluated. In a next step, unsteady RANS (uRANS) computations were performed to capture the highly vortical, unsteady flow field behind the spoilers. The differences compared to the steady approach are assessed. All investigations are performed with hexahedral-dominant grids, generated with the SOLAR software package, and the Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver TAU.