Key Innovation: a benchmark study
Comparison of different High-Order and Low-Order Panel Methods with CFD results
The following test case adopts a Boxwing defined in Aerodynamic Optimization Trade Study of a Box-Wing Aircraft Configuration (H Gagnon et al., Journal of Aircraft 53, 2016). This paper provides high-fidelity CFD results, which are considered as reference for the present benchmark study.
benchmark study
Comparison of different High-Order and Low-Order Panel Methods with CFD results
This section compares Aeolus ASP with three other methods in terms of fidelity and computational cost:
CFD reference analysis
In the CFD reference analysis, the angle of attack has been fixed to 5.406° which yields a reference lift coefficient of 0.5. With regard to the panel method solutions, the figure below shows the resulting lift coefficient as a function of the number of panels in the chord-wise direction, which is a measure of the panel mesh density. As expected, the high-order method PANAIR converges more quickly than the hybrid method Aeolus ASP, and the low-order method APAME. The XFLR5 Program exhibits the largest error in this test case.
Agreement with the CFD results
The next important property is induced drag. The plot below illustrates, that induced drag is more difficult to predict accurately. However, Aeolus ASP shows an excellent agreement with the CFD results, due to a novel induced drag calculation approach.
An acceptable fidelity of both lift and drag prediction for conceptual or preliminary wing design would thus require approximately:
- PANAIR: 34 Panels per wing strip
- APAME: 60+ Panels per wing strip
- XFLR: 30 Panels per wing strip
- AEOLUS ASP: 30 Panels per wing strip
Comparison of computational costs
Finally, let us compare the associated computational costs of these three panel methods. Therefore, parallelization and symmetry features were disabled. The plot below shows the normalized CPU-time over the number of panels per wing strip.
The same lift and drag fidelity level requires:
- PANAIR: 53 Units of time
- APAME: 43 Units of time
- XFLR: 110 Units of time
- AEOLUS ASP: 9 Units of time
We are constantly looking for new test and benchmark cases. Please don’t hesitate to contact us.
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Validation cases for aeolus ASP
We compared the computational results with wind tunnel data. These cases are intended to validate the aerodynamic kernel in Aeolus ASP by means of comparison with wind tunnel tests and CFD results for fixed wings and propellers.
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