Investigation of Aeroelastic Effects on the NASA Common Research Model

Abstract

Static fluid-structure coupled simulations were performed on NASA´s Common Research Model to assess the influence of aeroelastic effects on the numerical prediction of the overall aerodynamic coefficients and wing static pressure distributions. The numerical results of both rigid steady-state computational fluid dynamics and static aeroelastic coupled simulations were compared to the experimental data from wind tunnel test campaigns at NASA ’ s National Transonic Facility and the NASA Ames Research Center ’ s 11-Foot Transonic Wind Tunnel Facility. Coupled analyses were performed using an in-house simulation procedure built around the German Aerospace Research Center ’ s flow solver TAU and the commercial finite element analysis code NASTRAN®. The results show a considerable reduction of deviations between the computational results obtained during the fourth and fifth AIAA Computational Fluid Dynamics Drag Prediction Workshops and the measured data when aeroelastic wing deformations are taken into account.