High lift devices design of a supersonic transport aircraft based on 3D computational fluid dynamics.

Abstract

This paper presents an aerodynamic optimization chain whose purpose is to find the optimal High Lift Devices’ settings for a supersonic transport aircraft in take-off conditions. The automatic CFD process chain consists of several key elements: a CAD modeling software (Catia) that controls the aircraft’s external shape; a CAD translator (Cadfix), used for converting the geometric data to a format usable by the mesher; an unstructured grid generator (Solar); a finite volume Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes CFD code (DLR-TAU) for the evaluation of the aircraft’s aerodynamic performances. This ”CAD-in-the-loop” optimization chain has the advantage of delivering geometries in CAD format without loss of information due to conversion so that the final geometry can be directly used, for example to construct a model for wind tunnel testing. Furthermore, the unstructured mesh approach allows for the treatment of very complex geometries with relatively small effort, an important advantage compared to the more common (in optimization) structured multiblock approach. Two optimization strategies are used: a Response Surface Method (RSM) that relies on a Regression Kriging approach and the Simplex method. Both methods are found to be capable of solving this kind of optimization tasks and produce similar results.