Aerodynamic Modelling for Flight Dynamics Analysis of Conceptual Aircraft Designs

Physics based simulation in conceptual design is widely seen as a way of increasing the information about designs, thus helping with the avoidance of unanticipated problems as the design is refined. This paper reports on an effort to assess the use of CFD level aerodynamics for the development of tables for flight dynamics analysis at the conceptual stage. A number of aerodynamic data sources are used with sampling and data fusion to allow the efficient generation of the tables. A refined design passenger jet wind tunnel model is used as a test case, and three simplified conceptual versions of this geometry are generated. The influence of geometry approximations and modelling influences are evaluated to assess the usefulness of CFD for this application. Finally, the aerodynamic differences are assessed in terms of basic longitudinal flight dynamics analysis.