The flying-wing aircraft is a promising concept for the mid or long-term commercial aviation due to its excellent performance in aerodynamic and structure, which has been studied by a number of investigators both experimentally and computationally. However, the conditions in wind-tunnel testing do not necessarily reflect those observed in free flight, the support structure interference is an important factor to affect experimental data collected from wind tunnels. Support interference characteristics of a flying-wing model from subsonic to supersonic speed is investigated by numerical simulation methods. Results show that grid convergence is obtained with the series of grids, which implies that the solutions are in the asymptotic range. The support has a relatively small effect on aerodynamic characteristics of flying-wing aircraft at low speed while has a relatively large effect on drag at transonic speed and supersonic speed.
The internal weapon bay is widely used in modern aircraft; however, because the unsteady flows of the cavity would cause dangerous store separation and intense aerodynamic noise, the leading-edge spoiler is an easy and efficient passive flow-control method. The flow control of the leading-edge flat spoiler before the cavity of a low-aspect-ratio flying-wing aircraft is investigated based on numerical simulation. Numerical results show that the leading-edge flat spoiler completely changes the cavity flow; it obviously lifts up the shear layer and reduces the pressure inside the cavity. For the store separation from the weapon bay, the leading-edge flat spoiler is a very good passive flow-control method that curbs the nose-up trend of the store and produces a safe and stable store separation. Besides, the leading-edge spoiler reduces the noise in the rear of the cavity (max 8.2 dB), but increases the noise in the middle of the cavity (max 11.3 dB). In addition, the leading-edge spoiler brings in a large drag increase to the aircraft (39.41% when the height of spoiler is 0.2 m), which would affect the operational stability of the aircraft. The results of this paper could provide a reference for the flow control of weapon bays and the design of aircraft.
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