Aerodynamic design

• By  Kristian Schmidt
• 9 February, 2010
• Comments Off

We are hitting the 6 month marker by now. It seems like a long time, but it has actually flown almost as fast as our aircraft will. Much has changed in the aerodynamic design of the Zesar since the preliminary design. The use of a NACA airfoil has changed to multiple airfoils which we optimized for our flight conditions and also the planform has been further optimised. The optimisation process included models of 3D full potential flow combined with 2D viscous simulations to get reliable results. With the windtunnelmodel manufacturing going along steadily we are all very excited for the windtunneltest where we will find out how close our predictions come to reality!

Although the aerodynamic design took a lot of time, we made our models parametric which means that changes can be applied through the design very quickly. This can be changes in either planform, airfoils or size. This will make the design of the next CleanEra aircraft even more efficient since repetitive work required by the engineer is kept to a minimum. An example of the models we use is shown here, it is a full potential flow simulation of the aircraft using VSAERO.

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