Impact of Ground Effect on Airplane Lateral Directional Stability during Take-Off and Landing

Open Access journalComputational simulations of aerodynamic characteristics of the Common Research Model (CRM), representing a typical transport airliner are conducted using CFD methods in close proximity to the ground. The obtained dependencies on bank angle for aerodynamic forces and moments are further used in stability and controllability analysis of the lateral-directional aircraft motion. Essential changes in the lateral-directional modes in close proximity to the ground have been identified. For example, with approach to the ground, the roll subsidence and spiral eigenvalues are merging creating the oscillatory Roll-Spiral mode with quite significant frequency. This transformation of the lateral-directional dynamics in piloted simulation may affect the aircraft responses to external crosswind, modify handling quality characteristics and improve realism of crosswind landing. The material of this paper was presented at the Seventh European Conference for Aeronautics and Space Sciences EUCASS-2017. Further work is carried out for evaluation of the ground effect aerodynamics for a high-lift configuration based on a hybrid geometry of DLR F11 and NASA GTM models with fully deployed flaps and slats. Some aspects of grid generation for a high lift configuration using structured blocking approach are discussed