Master thesis and internship[BR]- Master's thesis : Aerodynamic and aeroelastic computations of full aircraft configurations[BR]- Integration Internship

Abstract

Transportation represents a 20% of green-house effect gases emissions worldwide nowadays. If none solutions are proposed, with air traffic increasing dramatically fast, none of the global politics to reduce the carbon footprint generated by human activities would be fulfilled. Aeronautic can get involved into this new global renovation via improving the aircraft's efficiency thanks to a reduction in the structural weight, an improvement on the aerodynamics efficiency or an expansion of free-fossil fuels powered systems. The combination of the first two lead the design of light and low stiff, highly loaded wings, which are subjected to significant deformations. Therefore, the aeroelastic deformations of these light wings is of paramount importance as it affects both the structural design and the aerodynamic performance. The present Master's Thesis is aimed at assessing the transonic aerodynamic and aeroelastic performance of a full aircraft configuration with full potential aerodynamics low-fidelity modeling techniques that are designed to suit the low computational cost of the preliminary stage of an aircraft design process. The benchmark full aircraft configuration of the present project is the Common Research Model with its wing-body-tail arrangement developed by the National Aeronautics and Space Administration. First, the model is adapted and validated to fit the requirements of a full potential aerodynamic solver. The later includes the generation of sharp trailing edges of the lifting surfaces and the inclusion of wake boundaries to enforce Kutta condition. The full potential Common Research Model is afterwards validated via three-dimensional aerodynamic simulations that compare results of three different fidelity levels: Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes, Euler's aerodynamics and full potential aerodynamics. The results prove a validation of the full potential model and evince that at the transonic flight design point, the capturing of the position of the shock is moved downstream when decreasing the level of fidelity. Finally, fluid-structure interactions are evaluated in the context of static aeroelastic computations. The results illustrate sufficiently reliable static deformations of the wing at the design flight condition with a low-fidelity fluid solver.