Investigation of Fluid-Structure-Coupling and Turbulence Model Effects on the DLR Results of the Fifth AIAA CFD Drag Prediction Workshop

Abstract

Static Fluid-Structure-Coupled (FSC) simulations were performed on NASA's Common Research Model (CRM) to assess the influence of aeroelastic effects on the numerical prediction of overall aerodynamic coefficients and wing static pressure distributions. Numerical results of both rigid steady state Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and static aeroelastic coupled simulations were compared to experimental data from wind tunnel test campaigns in NASA's National Transonic Facility (NTF) and the Ames 11-Foot Transonic Wind Tunnel Facility (TWT). Coupled analyses were performed using an in-house simulation procedure built around DLR's flow solver TAU and the commercial finite-element analysis code NASTRAN\textsuperscript{\textregistered}. Results show a considerable reduction of deviations between computational results obtained during the 4th and 5th AIAA CFD Drag Prediction Workshops (DPW) and measured data when aeroelastic wing deformations are taken into account.