National Center for Computational Sciences

PI: Moeljo Hong, The Boeing Company

The project is devoted to the development, correlations, and validations of large-scale computational tools for flight vehicles, thereby demonstrating the applicability and predictive accuracy of computational-fluid-dynamics tools in a real-life production environment. One experiment within this project is to investigate computationally what happens to a wing when a flap is suddenly deployed. Such “flutter analysis” has historically not included simulating both the structural wing response (the wing flaps) and the airflow around the wing. This requires coupling two complex codes together in a nonlinear fashion: one for the aerodynamics and one for the structural response of the wing. Such work helps to guide control surface studies; learn aerodynamic time lags and how to account for them to better design control laws, gain better confidence in control-surface free-play modeling, and help prevent unnecessary maintenance through more aggressive designs.