Numerical investigation on aerodynamic performance of a bionic flapping wing

This paper numerically studies the aerodynamic performance of a bird-like bionic flapping wing.The geometry and kinematics are designed based on a seagull wing,in which flapping,folding,swaying,and twisting are considered.An in-house unsteady flow solver based on hybrid moving grids.is adopted for unsteady flow simulations.We focus on two main issues in this study,i.e.,the influence of the proportion of down-stroke and the effect of span-wise twisting.Numerical results show that the proportion of downstroke is closely related to the efficiency of the flapping process.The preferable proportion is about 0.7 by using the present geometry and kinematic model,which is very close to the observed data.Another finding is that the drag and the power consumption can be greatly reduced by the proper span-wise twisting.Two cases with different reduced frequencies are simulated and compared with each other.The numerical results show that the power consumption reduces by more than 20%,and the drag coefficient reduces by more than 60% through a proper twisting motion for both cases.The flow mechanism is mainly due to controlling of unsteady flow separation by adjusting the local effective angle of attack.These conclusions will be helpful for the high-performance micro air vehicle (MAV) design.

A CFD-based numerical virtual flight simulator and its application in control law design of a maneuverable missile model

A CFD-based Numerical Virtual Flight(NVF)simulator is presented,which integrates an unsteady flow solver on moving hybrid grids,a Rigid-Body Dynamics(RBD)solver and a module of the Flight Control System(FCS).A technique of dynamic hybrid grids is developed to control the active control surfaces with body morphing,with a technique of parallel unstructured dynamic overlapping grids generating proper moving grids over the deflecting control surfaces(e.g.the afterbody rudders of a missile).For the flow/kinematic coupled problems,the 6 Degree-Of-Freedom(DOF)equations are solved by an explicit or implicit method coupled with the URANS CFD solver.The module of the control law is explicitly coupled into the NVF simulator and then improved by the simulation of the pitching maneuver process of a maneuverable missile model.A nonlinear dynamic inversion method is then implemented to design the control law for the pitching process of the maneuverable missile model.Simulations and analysis of the pitching maneuver process are carried out by the NVF simulator to improve the flight control law.Higher control response performance is obtained by adjusting the gain factors and adding an integrator into the control loop.

An automatic isotropic/anisotropic hybrid grid generation technique for viscous flow simulations based on an artificial neural network

Based on the author’s previous research, a novel hybrid grid generation technique is developed by introducing an Artificial Neural Network(ANN) approach for realistic viscous flow simulations. An initial hybrid grid over a typical geometry with anisotropic quadrilaterals in the boundary layer and isotropic triangles in the off-body region is generated by the classical mesh generation method to train two ANNs on how to predict the advancing direction of the new point and to control the grid size. After inputting the initial discretized fronts, the ANN-based Advancing Layer Method(ALM) is adopted to generate the anisotropic quadrilaterals in boundary layers. When the high aspect ratio of the anisotropic grid reaches a specified value, the ANN-based Advancing Front Method(AFM) is adopted to generate isotropic triangles in the off-body computational domain.The initial isotropic triangles are smoothed to further improve the grid quality. Three typical cases are tested and compared with experimental data to validate the effectiveness of grids generated by the ANN-based hybrid grid generation method. The experimental results show that the two ANNs can predict the advancing direction and the grid size very well, and improve the adaptability of the isotropic/anisotropic hybrid grid generation for viscous flow simulations.

Applications of multi-dimensional schemes on unstructured grids for high-accuracy heat flux prediction

The simulation of hypersonic flows with fully unstructured(tetrahedral)grids has severe problems with respect to the prediction of stagnation region heating,due to the random face orientation without alignment to the bow shock.To improve the accuracy of aero-heating predictions,three multi-dimensional approaches on unstructured grids are coupled in our Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes(RANS)solver,including multi-dimensional upwind flux reconstruction(MUP),multi-dimensional limiter(MLP-u2)and multi-dimensional gradient reconstruction(MLR).The coupled multi-dimensional RANS solver is validated by several typical verification and validation(V&V)cases,including hypersonic flows over a cylinder,a blunt biconic,and a double-ellipsoid,with commonly used prism/tetrahedral hybrid grids.Finally,the coupled multi-dimensional solver is applied to simulating the heat flux distribution over a 3D engineering configuration,i.e.a Hermes-like space shuttle model.The obtained numerical results are compared with experimental data.The predicted results demonstrate that the coupled multi-dimensional approach has a good prediction capability on aerodynamic heating over a wide range of complex engineering configurations.

Accuracy analysis of gradient reconstruction on isotropic unstructured meshes and its effects on inviscid flow simulation

The accuracy of gradient reconstruction methods on unstructured meshes is analyzed both mathematically and numerically.Mathematical derivations reveal that,for gradient reconstruction based on the Green-Gauss theorem(the GG methods),if the summation of first-and-lower-order terms does not counterbalance in the discretized integral process,which rarely occurs,second-order accurate approximation of face midpoint value is necessary to produce at least first-order accurate gradient.However,gradient reconstruction based on the least-squares approach(the LSQ methods)is at least first-order on arbitrary unstructured grids.Verifications are performed on typical isotropic grid stencils by analyzing the relationship between the discretization error of gradient reconstruction and the discretization error of the face midpoint value approximation of a given analytic function.Meanwhile,the numerical accuracy of gradient reconstruction methods is examined with grid convergence study on typical isotropic grids.Results verify the phenomenon of accuracy degradation for the GG methods when the face midpoint value condition is not satisfied.The LSQ methods are proved to be at least first-order on all tested isotropic grids.To study gradient accuracy effects on inviscid flow simulation,solution errors are quantified using the Method of Manufactured Solutions(MMS)which was validated before adoption by comparing with an exact solution case,i.e.,the 2-dimensional(2D)inviscid isentropic vortex.Numerical results demonstrate that the order of accuracy(OOA)of gradient reconstruction is crucial in determining the OOA of numerical solutions.Solution accuracy deteriorates seriously if gradient reconstruction does not reach first-order.