Rapid Prediction of Hybrid Wing Body Aerodynamics
Griffin A. DiMaggio, Roy Hartfield, Vivek Ahuja
Abstract
View Video Presentation: https://doi.org/10.2514/6.2022-3298.vid This paper describes the use of a surface vorticity solver to address the aerodynamic loads for a blended hybrid wing body. The low-speed aerodynamics of NASA’s N2A Hybrid Wing Body (HWB) aircraft were fully developed in wind tunnel test and the vorticity solver FlightStream® by Research in Flight was used to develop companion solutions for validation purposes. Surface vorticity is efficiently computed by FlightStream® using a fast multipole method. Viscous effects are implemented in the vorticity solver with boundary integral methods and, for separated flows, inviscid-viscous coupling is included. Two configurations of the N2A are analyzed: a cruise configuration and a drooped leading-edge configuration. Load and pressure results are compared to wind tunnel measurements and the method is compared to the Cart3D Inviscid Euler-Adjoint Solver. The onset of stall is captured by FlightStream® for both configurations. The surface vorticity solver produced solutions on the order of minutes with good agreement between the experimental findings and the Euler solver.