Executive transport aircraft with truss-braced wing (World's First)

     To explore large-er aspect ratio wings; one fine morning, I just thought it would be fun to put a truss-braced wing in a Piaggio P.180 "Avanti". The modified design CAD files are is available here. A comparison is shown in Fig. 1. I am too lazy to make 2 separate airplanes so I modified half of it so I can run a CFD analysis using one model and one mesh 🤣. A slight modification about which I will write later is the positioning of the flaps and ailerons. These are moved to the truss part from the main wing in the original design. The aspect ratio is of the truss-braced section is double the original. With a foldable wing, storage shouldn't be a problem?

Fig. 1, Row 1, L-R Top, bottom; Row 2, L-R front, back; Row 3 L-R, left, right views

     Cruise conditions are taken from [1] i.e. ~12,500 m and ~163.6 m/s. The CFD mesh has 4,892,425 cells out of those, 449,732 are the the surface of the jet. I compare lift/drag of both halves. The modified section produces 36.15% more drag (force) as compared to the original design. The modified section however, produces 49% more lift (force) than the original design. L/D for truss-winged section is at 6.72 as compared to 6.14 for the original design. In terms of L/D, the truss-braced wing section produced 🥁 ... 9.45% more Lift/Drag. A resounding success 😁, I'd say. For validation of CFD, read this and this.

     Some post processing I did, is shown in Fig. 2. Velocity iso-lines with vectors are shown around the wings. Vorticity is shown in the wake of the jet(s). Tip vortex is smaller and less intense behind the truss-braced wing portion but there is another vortex where the truss meets with the main wing. In the main wing, for the trussed-braced portion; on the pressure side; the high pressure zones extend for a longer portion of the span in the span-wise direction as compared to the original design. Same is true for low pressure zones on the suction side of the main wing. Some day I will write a nice little paper and sent it to an AIAA conference, till then 𝌗.

Fig. 2, Colorful Fluid Dynamics 🌈

     Stream-wise vorticity is shown in Fig. 3. It is clear from Fig. 3 that the vorticity is less intense on the side with truss-braced wing as compared to the original design. Fig. 3 is colored by stream-wise velocity. The aircraft appears blue due to no slip condition.

Fig. 3, Some more Colorful Fluid Dynamics (CFD) 🌈

     Thank you for reading, if you would like to hire me as your master's / PhD student / post-doc / collaborate on research projects, please reach out! 😌

References

[1] "Operations Planning Guide". Business & Commercial Aviation. Aviation Week. May 2016. [https://web.archive.org/web/20160815060134/http://www.sellajet.com/adpages/BCA-2016.pdf]

Turbulent Fluid Structure Interaction (FSI) - Benchmark Case

     After weeks spent self-learning about this type of simulation and countless nights spent troubleshooting this complex problem, I am pleased to share results. 😇 This post is about the FSI analysis of the FSI-PfS-2a. A case designed by Dr. Breuer. The geometry is shown in Fig. 1. The geometry details are available in ref. [1]. The geometry is made in SolidWorks CAD package and then imported to ANSYS via .STEP file. FSI combines Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and structural analysis, i.e. the Finite Element Method (FEM).

Fig. 1, The geometry

     A combination of ANSYS Fluent, Mechanical and System Coupling are used for the analysis. Fig. 2 shows post-processing animation from the simulation. The top left shows stress while the displacements of the material are shown in top right. Bottom left and right show fluid velocity and vorticity, respectively. The vorticity is plotted along the axis perpendicular to the both lift and drag forces. the image in the center of animation shows fluid pressure acting on the cylinder and plate. Stagnation pressure is observed to change with time.

Fig. 2, The animation

     The boundary conditions from Mechanical are shown in Fig. 3. The condition A refers to gravity at 9.8066 m/s2 while B refers to fixed-support condition applied to the edge touching the cylinder. Boundary condition C refers to the fluid-solid interface. It is at these regions forces and displacements are exchanged. The structural mesh has 180 elements and 1,156 nodes. It is to be noted that the fluid regions are not meshed in mechanical and vice-versa. Furthermore, the number of mesh elements is limited by the system memory. The steel and rubber portions are connected via 4 connections i.e. edge/edge and edge/face contacts. The unmarked regions within Fig. 3 (top) are made symmetric. The  steel and rubber are considered linear elastic. No external force is applied in mechanical so this case can also be called as a case of vortex-induced vibrations. The direct sparse FEM solver is used for the Structural-FSI simulation.

Fig. 3, The boundary conditions and mesh

     The CFD mesh is shown in Fig. 4. The mesh is created using sweep method. Refinements are applied in areas of interest, i.e. wake and around the structure, using bodies of influence. Moreover, inflation mesh for y+ of 7.55 is applied on the cylinder to properly capture the boundary layer. The FSI-CFD simulation is initialized with data from static transient analysis using k–ω SST DES turbulence model. The k–ω DES model is initialized using static steady-state k–ω SST model. The flow parameters include a velocity of 1.385 m/s [1] corresponding to a Reynolds number of 30,470. The mesh has 79,305 cells. The dynamic mesh is handled through remeshing and smoothing via the radial basis function. Water is taken as a fluid for this simulation, same as [1]. Symmetry is applied to the walls facing perpendicular to flow. Top and bottom walls of the structure are considered adiabatic and with no shear. The SIMPLE algorithm is used. 2nd order accurate discretization schemes are used.

Fig. 4, The computational domain and the mesh

     It should be noted that for this simulations only 20 mm section of the whole geometry is simulated. This is because of computational resources limitations. The simulations took ~12 hours to solve 0.268 s of physical time with 32 GB RAM and 6 core CPU. The mesh motion along with vorticity iso-surfaces are shown in Fig. 5.

Fig. 5, The mesh and vorticity animation

     Thank you for reading, if you would like to hire me as your PhD student / post-doc  / collaborate on projects, please reach out.

References

[1] A. Kalmbach and M. Breuer, "Experimental PIV/V3Vmeasurementsofvortex-induced fluid–structure interaction in turbulent flow—A new benchmark FSI-PfS-2a", Journal of Fluids and Structures, Vol. 42, pp 369–387, 2013

Datacenter Visualization (Verified and Validated)

     This simulation is done to create an aero-thermal digital twin of a datacenter using CFD. The details of datacenter are taken from [1]. The datacenter CAD model is shown in Fig. 1.

     The simulation employs κ − ε turbulence model with damping functions, SIMPLE-R (modified), as the numerical algorithm and second-order upwind and central approximations as the spatial discretization schemes for the convective fluxes and diffusive terms. The time derivatives are approximated with an implicit first-order Euler scheme. Flow simulation solves the Navier–Stokes equations, which are formulations of mass, momentum, and energy conservation laws for fluid flows. To predict turbulent flows, the Favre-averaged Navier–Stokes equations are used.

Fig. 1, Datacenter CAD

     A Cartesian mesh with octree refinement, cut-cell method and immersed boundary methods is used. Special mesh refinements are deployed in the areas of interest i.e. inlets and outlets and sharp edges of server racks and CRAH units to accurately capture aero-thermal gradients and vortices. The resulting computational mesh has 2,698,156 cells. The computational domain and mesh are shown in Fig. 2.

Fig. 2, Computational mesh and domain

     The results from the numerical analysis were compared with [1]. The results are in excellent agreement with previously published data. The animation in Fig. 3 shows thermal distribution inside datacenter using cut-plots. Fluid velocity distribution is also shown. The cut-plots are superimposed with streamlines and velocity vectors. These post processing features help identify hot-spots and recirculation zones. Design improvements can be made to reduce thee unwanted flow features. Within Fig. 3, Flow trajectories colored by air temperature are also shown. These show path the fluid takes between various inlets and outlets in the datacenter such as the CRAH system supply and return zones and inlets and outlets of servers. Fig. 4 shows various post processing tools available for diagnosing various issues from the aero-thermal perspective. These include iso-surfaces, cut-plots, flow trajectories and surface plots etc.

Fig. 3, The post processing animations

Fig. 4, The post processing images

     A comparison of the results from present simulations with previously published literature is shown in Fig. 5. it can be seen that out results are in close agreement with previously published numerical and experimental data [1]! The locations at which the data is extracted is shown in Fig. 6. Within Fig. 5, solid lines indicate present study, dashed lines indicate published numerical results and filled circles represent published experimental results.

Fig. 5, Comparison of results

Fig. 6, Location of data extraction

     If you want to collaborate on the research projects related to turbomachinery, aerodynamics, renewable energy, please reach out. Thank you very much for reading.

References

[1] Wibron, Emelie, Anna-Lena Ljung, and T. Staffan Lundström. 2018. "Computational Fluid Dynamics Modeling and Validating Experiments of Airflow in a Data Center" Energies 11, no. 3: 644. https://doi.org/10.3390/en11030644

Aperiodic Aero-foil Kinematics

     This post is about a 2D NACA 0012 aero-foil undergoing forced aperiodic heaving. Heaving motion is achieved by the plot shown in Fig. 1. Plot within Fig. 1 represents position of airfoil at various time steps.

Fig. 1, The position of aero-foil

     The animation of the vorticity contours are shown in Fig. 2. The velocity, pressure and vorticity for aperiodic heaving is shown in Fig. 3. A comparison will be made with heaving later, if ever 😀. As far as aerodynamic forces are concerned, per-cycle C_{l, avg} is at 0.63 as compared to 0.0 for periodic heaving. C_{d, avg} aperiodic heaving is at 0.162 as compared to 0.085 for periodic heaving. Of course, this is done on a coarse mesh. If ever I write a paper about this... 😀

Fig. 2, Top Row, Aperiodic, periodic heaving airfoil 

     

Fig. 3, Top Row, L-R, Vorticity, pressure. Bottom Row, Velocity 

     If you want to collaborate on the research projects related to turbomachinery, aerodynamics, renewable energy, please reach out. Thank you very much for reading.