Validation of numerical prediction of dynamic derivatives: The DLR-F12 and the Transcruiser test cases

The dynamic derivatives are widely used in linear aerodynamic models in order to determine the flying qualities of an aircraft: the ability to predict them reliably, quickly and sufficiently early in the design process is vital in order to avoid late and costly component redesigns. This paper describes experimental and computational research dealing with the determination of dynamic derivatives carried out within the FP6 European project SimSAC. Numerical and experimental results are compared for two aircraft configurations: a generic civil transport aircraft, wing-fuselage-tail configuration called the DLR-F12 and a generic Transonic CRuiser, which is a canard configuration. Static and dynamic wind tunnel tests have been carried out for both configurations and are briefly described within this paper. The data generated for both the DLR-F12 and TCR configurations include force and pressure coefficients obtained during small amplitude pitch, roll and yaw oscillations while the data for the TCR configuration also include large amplitude oscillations, in order to investigate the dynamic effects on nonlinear aerodynamic characteristics. In addition, dynamic derivatives have been determined for both configurations with a large panel of tools, from linear aerodynamic (Vortex Lattice Methods) to CFD. This work confirms that an increase in fidelity level enables the dynamic derivatives to be calculated more accurately. Linear aerodynamics tools are shown to give satisfactory results but are very sensitive to the geometry/mesh input data. Although all the quasi-steady CFD approaches give comparable results (robustness) for steady dynamic derivatives, they do not allow the prediction of unsteady components for the dynamic derivatives (angular derivatives with respect to time): this can be done with either a fully unsteady approach i.e. with a time-marching scheme or with frequency domain solvers, both of which provide comparable results for the DLR-F12 test case. As far as the canard configuration is concerned, strong limitations for the linear aerodynamic tools are observed. A key aspect of this work are the acceleration techniques developed for CFD methods, which allow the computational time to be dramatically reduced while providing comparable results. (C) 2011 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.