Aircraft control surface deflection using RBF-based mesh deformation

Kurzfassung

In this paper, mesh deformation based on radial basis function (RBF) interpolation is applied to the deflection of aircraft control surfaces. A confinement technique is presented, which locally restricts mesh deformation to the vicinity of the moving component and leaves the surfaces of other components unaffected. This technique is shown to have the potential to significantly reduce the CPU time necessary for evaluating the RBF interpolants. Motivated by the directionality of control surface deflection, the idea of treating each direction of the displacements separately is introduced. It is employed for the adaptive selection of centers, and the approach termed sequential uni-variate center adaptation. It is shown to be more efficient for both solution and evaluation processes than the standard approach, in which the same set of centers is used for every direction. Furthermore, different data sites may be imposed for different directions. It is demonstrated that this enables sliding motion of the elements on the face of a mesh block. Thereby, large control surface deflections are possible, despite the presence of a small spanwise gap between control surface and parent component. These techniques are successfully applied to the deflection of aileron and horizontal tail of a generic fighter aircraft configuration.