Abstract
During the first few seconds of an airdrop the supplies heavily interact with the wake of the military transport aircraft. Due to the particular shape of their rear fuselage and the voluminous landing gear fairings the flow field behind the aircraft is highly vortical. Flying in airdrop configuration even aggravates the situation. To comprehensively analyze and evaluate the airdrop capabilities of military transport aircraft DLR has developed a simulation approach, coupling the DLR TAU code with the multibody simulation tool SIMPACK. This approach enables DLR to compute the trajectories of airdropped supplies under full consideration of flow interaction effects. For various cargo and cargo–parachute configurations DLR successfully demonstrated that this approach is well-suited to accurately compute an airdrop sequence. The results of two of these configurations are presented in this paper.
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- 1.
Abbreviation of: Military Transport Aircraft, project term 2009–2013.
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Acknowledgments
The authors would like to thank N. Bier from the Transport Aircraft Department of the DLR Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology and the entire team of the DNW-NWB for their support in preparing, conducting and analyzing the wind tunnel experiments as well as A. Raichle and G. Einarsson from the C\(^2\)A\(^2\)S\(^2\)E department of the same DLR institute for their continuous support in establishing the coupled simulation process.
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Geisbauer, S., Schmidt, H. (2016). Validation of CFD Airdrop Simulations in the Vortical Wake of an Aircraft with Open Ramp. In: Dillmann, A., Heller, G., Krämer, E., Wagner, C., Breitsamter, C. (eds) New Results in Numerical and Experimental Fluid Mechanics X. Notes on Numerical Fluid Mechanics and Multidisciplinary Design, vol 132. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27279-5_3
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-27279-5_3
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