Completed only 20 days after the aircraft geometry was initially acquired, these computations showed that air deflected by the wing flap and vortices generated by the landing gear pod severely disrupted flow near the aircraft doors. However, computation utility went well beyond qualitative problem identification. High solution accuracy and rapid turnaround time enabled quantitative optimization of flight parameters for paratroop deployment. This, in turn, substantially improved air flow quality near the doors and greatly enhanced paratroop deployment. Adaptive refinement concentrates computational power in the aircraft flow field where the dominant physical interactions occur.
Cartesian grids facilitate discretization of complex aircraft surface geometries.
Without this technology, existing computational resources would be insufficient to resolve crucial physical effects in aircraft flow fields. In April, the Nippon Electric Corporation's Opto-Electronics Research Laboratory in Tsukuba, Japan, welcomed Capt. James A. Lott, an AFIT assistant professor of electrical engineering. Captain Lott's research focuses on design, modeling, characterization, and fabrication of compound semiconductor optoelectronic materials and devices. Catastrophic optical damage is a primary failure mechanism of these types of lasers, and limits the maximum obtainable output power density.