Investigation of Aero-Elastic Effects on the DLR Results of the Fifth AIAA Drag Prediction Workshop

Abstract

Static Fluid-Structure-Coupled (FSC) simulations were performed on NASA’s Common Research Model (CRM) to assess the influence of aero-elastic effects on the numerical prediction of overall aerodynamic coefficients and wing static pressure distributions. Numerical results of both conventional Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and coupled simulations were compared to experimental data from a wind tunnel test campaign in NASA’s National Transonic Facility (NTF). Coupled analyses were per- formed using an in-house simulation procedure built around DLR’s flow solver TAU and the commercial finite-element analysis code NASTRAN R . 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 aero-elastic wing deformations are taken into account.