Master thesis and internship[BR]- Master's thesis : Development of a C++/Python Field Panel Method for Aeroelastic Computations[BR]- Integration Internship

Abstract

The dramatic and fast growth of aeronautics over a century has led to a humongous amount of aircraft in the skies. This number being in constant increase, the aeronautical industry is developing new planes and new technologies at a relentless rhythm. On top of that, environmental goals targeted during the last decades put some pressure on the sector when it comes to the gas emissions. Therefore, the need of a tool being able of accurately and rapidly predicting the aerodynamics and the fuel consumption of an aircraft during its preliminary design became urgent.

High fidelity models, such as the Navier-Stokes equations or Low Eddy Simulations are not adequate since they require a large computational cost and it takes a very long time to obtain the results. Even the standard in aircraft design, the Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations is not the best option. As a matter of fact, the required time (of the order of hours) is still too much to be able to perform quick modifications during the early stages of the preliminary design. A viable candidate is the full potential equation. Such a model provides very fast results at a low computational cost.

Many comparisons have shown that interesting results were obtained on deformed wings by performing linear computations coupled with a fluid-structure interaction solver as these results were quite close to the results directly obtained from nonlinear computations. The purpose of this master thesis is then to implement a field panel method, called fpm, solving the linear potential equation and coupling it to an already existing fluid-structure interaction solver in order to compute the aerodynamics of a wing in its deformed configuration. The results of the computations can then be used to analyse the aeroelasticity of the wing as well as its aerodynamic coefficients (that can directly relate to the performance of the aircraft and, somehow, to its fuel consumption).

The results presented in this work revealed that a good match between the results of the coupling and nonlinear results was obtained. Furthermore, a larger comparison with many results from the literature also strengthened this observation. It was also shown that aeroelasticity and thus fluid-structure interaction is a non-negligible phenomenon that significantly influences the aerodynamics of a wing. For instance, it decreases the lift coefficient while increasing the drag coefficient. The modification of the aerodynamic parameters can have a serious impact on the design and the performance of an aircraft, ultimately resulting in an unpredicted fuel consumption.