Aircraft Flight Control Model using Computational Fluid Dynamics
Keywords:
Computational fluid dynamic, Stability and Control derivatives, State-space modelAbstract
In aircraft design, one of the most critical aspects is aircraft stability and control, which needs to be considered with the utmost accuracy. Implementation of the software can increase the capability of the aircraft design, and also provide the effectiveness of working-time and saving other resources of the wind tunnel experiments. In this paper, computer code is developed for computing the stability and control derivatives for aircraft preliminary design by using aerodynamic coefficients, mass properties, and aircraft geometry. Moreover, the computer code can be used to generate an aircraft state-space model for the flight control design. The aerodynamic coefficients are estimated using computational fluid dynamic (CFD) software, while mass properties and aircraft geometry were carried out using computer-aid design (CAD) software. The proposed code was written using MATLAB computing language for efficient complex mathematical calculations while CFD analysis is performed via SOLIDWORKS software. The stability and control derivatives results of a transport aircraft model are evaluated with the code and compared to the results from Athena Vortex Lattice (AVL). At Mach 0.3, the results from the developed software are close to AVL with 16.36% of mean derivatives error. Due to transonic flow that cannot be captured by Vortex Lattice Method (VLM) in AVL, the error is increased to 20.64% and 22.50% at Mach 0.6 and Mach 0.8 respectively. The proposed software can be a high fidelity and efficient tool for aircraft design.
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