The NATO STO Task Group AVT-201 on ‘Extended Assessment of Stability and Control Prediction Methods for NATO Air Vehicles’

Abstract

The ability to accurately predict both static and dynamic stability characteristics of air vehicles using computational fluid dynamics (CFD) methods could revolutionize the air vehicle design process, especially for military air vehicles. A validated CFD capability would significantly reduce the number of ground tests required to verify vehicle concepts and, in general, could eliminate costly vehicle ‘repair’ campaigns required to fix performance anomalies that were not adequately predicted prior to full-scale vehicle development. This paper outlines the extended integrated experimental and numerical approach to assess the of stability and control prediction method capabilities as well as the design and estimation the control device effectiveness for highly swept low observable UCAV configurations. The aim of the AVT-201 Task Group is to provide an assessment of the CFD capabilities using model scale experiments and transferring this knowledge to real scale applications