In recent years, significant resources have been invested to further improve the efficiency and environmental sustainability of modern aircraft. A possible strategy consists of reducing the induced-drag contribution (40% of total drag) by means of wing tip devices, e.g. winglets. However, these solutions have a negative impact on structural sizing, requiring reinforcements, and aeroelastic stability, requiring mass balancing. The subject of this study is the numerical study of an alternative wing tip device. In particular, two different design concepts are presented, namely discrete and raked options. These solutions improve the aerodynamic efficiency by extending the wing span and feature an integrated aeroelastic passive load alleviation capability. The design of the wing tip devices follows a multi-fidelity approach, closely matching today's best practices in the aerospace industry. In the first part of the study, the design phase is carried out with lowfidelity very efficient tools. In the second part, the most promising solutions are verified with high-fidelity more expensive tools, within the framework of computational aeroelasticity.
The reduced weight and improved efficiency of modern aeronautical structures (as a consequence of e.g. MDO, composite materials) result in a smaller and smaller separation of rigid and elastic modes frequency ranges. Therefore the availability of an integrated environment for aeroservoelastic analysis is mandatory from the very beginning of the design process. Together with the availability of more and more powerful computing resources, current trends pursue the adoption of high fidelity tools and state-of-the-art technology within the very active and fruitful research fields of Computational Structural Dynamics (CSD), Multibody System Dynamics (MSD) and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD). This choice is somehow obliged when dealing with non-linear aeroservoelastic phenomena, such as in the transonic regime. In this paper we illustrate the implementation of a platform for solving multidisciplinary non-linear Fluid-Structure Interaction (FSI) problems coupling high-fidelity CSD and CFD tools by means of a robust interface scheme. We deal with mesh deformation by means of a novel hierarchical strategy particularly suited for aeroelastic simulation of free flying aircraft. The credibility of the developed set of analysis procedures is assessed by tackling the non-linear aeroelastic trim problem for a free-flying aircraft taking into account different design configurations and maneuvers. The results are compared with the outputs of classical linear(ized) methods.
For the aerodynamic design of multistage compressors and turbines Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) plays a fundamental role. In fact it allows the characterization of the complex behaviour of turbomachinery components with high fidelity. Together with the availability of more and more powerful computing resources, current trends pursue the adoption of such high-fidelity tools and state-of-the-art technology even in the preliminary design phases. Within such a framework Graphical Processing Units (GPUS) yield further growth potential, allowing a significant reduction of CFD process turn-around times at relatively low costs. The target of the present work is to illustrate the design and implementation of an explicit density-based RANS coupled solver for the efficient and accurate numerical simulation of multi-dimensional time-dependent compressible fluid flows on polyhedral unstructured meshes. The solver has been developed within the object-oriented OpenFOAM framework, using OpenCL bindings to interface CPU and GPU and using MPI to interface multiple GPUS. The overall structure of the code, the numerical strategies adopted and the algorithms implemented are specifically designed in order to best exploit the huge computational peak power offered by modern GPUS, by minimizing memory transfers between CPUs and GPUS and potential branch divergence occurrences. This has a significant impact in terms of the speedup factor and is especially challenging within a polyhedral unstructured mesh framework. Specific tools for turbomachinery applications, such as Arbitrary Mesh Interface (AMI) and mixingplane (MP), are implemented within the GPU context. The credibility of the proposed CFD solver is assessed by tackling a number of benchmark test problems, including Rotor 67 axial compressor, C3X stator blade with conjugate heat transfer and Aachen multi-stage turbine. An average GPU speedup factor of approximately S ≈ 50 with respect to CPU is achieved (single precision, both GPU and CPU in 100 USD price range). Preliminary parallel scalability test run on multiple GPUS show a parallel efficiency factor of approximately E ≈ 75%
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