CFD Analysis of Civil Transport Aircraft

Understanding the motion of air around an object enables the calculations of forces acting on the object. The accurate prediction of aerodynamic coefficient is an important design parameter in preliminary design phase of civil transport aircraft. The common research model utilized by the Drag Prediction Workshop is employed to investigate the accuracy of CFD codes in transonic aerodynamic flow analysis. Solutions are obtained for the wing body configuration. Grid convergence and resolution, mesh topology are considered the primary factors in this study for accurate prediction of aerodynamic coefficients. The current work deals with grid sensitivity studies demonstrated for in-viscid simulations over a typical civil transport aircraft near transonic regime. The commercial grid generation tool ICEM CFD is used for meshing and Euler version of ANSYS FLUENT is used as a solver for numerical computations. The initial study is carried out for CRM model and based on these grid sensitivity studies, typical civil transport aircraft is studied. The lift coefficient value obtained is 0.3389 which is close to value of 0.4 reported in experiment. The experimental data taken from drag prediction workshop for the common research model are well agreed with CFD results.