An industrial view on numerical simulation for aircraft aerodynamic design (2011)

In Airbus view, one major objective for the aircraft industry is the reduction of aircraft development lead-time and the provision of robust solutions with highly improved quality. In that context it is important to exploit all opportunities provided by enhanced or new classes of numerical simulation tools, e.g. high fidelity multi-disciplinary Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) and powerful High Performance Computing (HPC) capabilities. To help meet the challenge of superior product development it will finally be essential to numerically ‘flight-test’ a virtual aircraft with all its multi-disciplinary interactions in a computer environment and to compile all of the data required for the development and certification with guaranteed accuracy in a reduced time frame. Numerical simulation is foreseen to provide a tremendous increase in aircraft design efficiency and quality over the next decades. This concept is considered by Airbus as one of the long term main objectives for aircraft development. Progress in HPC will essentially contribute to achieve this goal. Considerable changes of aircraft design processes and way of working will lead to significant reduction of development times while including more and more disciplines in the early phases of design activities in order to find an overall optimum aircraft design. Aerodynamic Design deals with the development of outer shapes of an aircraft, optimizing for its performance, handling qualities and loads. A major ingredient to the design process is the numerical simulation of the external airflow. The capabilities to predict the flow not only near the design point but also under other challenging conditions in a given flight envelope is a prerequisite for optimization towards market requirements. Since it began about 50 years ago, CFD has made important progress in terms of accuracy of the physical models, robustness and efficiency of the nonlinear solution algorithms and reliability of the overall prediction approach. This trend will continue over the next decades. In our view, along with the increasing capability to model and compute all major multi-disciplinary aspects of an aircraft, in the long term it will become possible to ‘fly’ and investigate the complete aircraft in the computer. Currently numerical simulation provides good means to analyse the flow around the aircraft in detail, although the regime of flow separation onset up to maximum lift conditions is still not modelled accurately enough, nonlinearities and turbulence modelling for separated flows are still a major concern. It was not only the increase in HPC power that made more sophisticated Navier-Stokes solving enter the daily industrial design process. Better understanding and mathematical analysis of the system of Navier-Stokes equations led to more powerful algorithms, to more capable software and more comprehensive analysis of aircraft flows. However, a lot work remains to be done. Next decade’s goal will be to better exploit more accurate and efficient numerical formulations, advanced turbulence models and to achieve a fully flexible and automatic CFD capability that works in a fully adaptive manner, providing the best quality solution at minimum cost and time. This will lead to a complete change in the way future aircraft will be designed.