Three Dimensional Aerodynamic Analysis of a High-Lift Transport Configuration

Two computational methods, a surface panel method and an Euler method employing unstructured grid methodology, were used to analyze a subsonic transport aircraft in cruise and high-lift conditions. The computational results were compared with two separate sets of flight data obtained for the cruise and high-lift configurations. For the cruise configuration, the surface pressures obtained by the panel method and the Euler method agreed fairly well with results from flight test. However, for the high-lift configuration considerable differences were observed when the computational surface pressures were compared with the results from high-lift flight test. On the lower surface of all the elements with the exception of the slat, both the panel and Euler methods predicted pressures which were in good agreement with flight data. On the upper surface of all the elements the panel method predicted slightly higher suction compared to the Euler method. On the upper surface of the slat, pressure coefficients obtained by both the Euler and panel methods did not agree with the results of the flight tests. A sensitivity study of the upward deflection of the slat from the 40 deg. flap setting suggested that the differences in the slat deflection between the computational model and the flight configuration could be one of the sources of this discrepancy. The computation time for the implicit version of the Euler code was about 1/3 the time taken by the explicit version though the implicit code required 3 times the memory taken by the explicit version