WAKE INTEGRATION TO PREDICT WING SPAN LOADING FROM A NUMERICAL-SIMULATION

An important aspect in the application of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) is the determination of the resulting forces on the geometry of interest. The typical approach to computing forces on a body consists of integrating the pressures (and possibly skin friction) over the surface. However, the grid required to obtain an accurate resolution of the forces varies drastically with the geometry and can be memory-prohibitive in some cases. The integration of pressure can also provide some difficulties when overset grids are used due to the overlapping regions of the surface grids. A new approach to computing wing span loading from a CFD result is presented in this Note. The method uses the CFD solution to create an “equivalent” lifting line model from which the lift and induced drag are computed. © 1995 American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc., All rights reserved.