By Dr. Greg Stuckert, Aerospace & Defense Industry Director, Fluent Inc., Fluent Inc.
SubscribeCommercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) software evolved out of the US and UK in the 1980's and 1990's as a powerful engineering design tool for modelling fluid flow for defense and other industrial applications.
Since then, CFD development and deployment in the worldwide defense industry has gathered pace as its benefits have become obvious and been proven time and again in terms of saving money in product development processes, improving product quality and understanding fluid flows better.
Many engineers associate CFD with its well-known application to aerodynamics, namely the calculation of the lifting force or drag on a wing. However, as CFD methods and resources have increased in power and the software’s ease-of-use has advanced dramatically, CFD practitioners have expanded the scope of application beyond the calculation of lift and drag.
A typical recent sampling of interesting applications of the FLUENT CFD code to the resolution of complex defense operational problems includes:
- The impact of trailing vortices on the safe operation of successive aircraft taking-off and landing on a runway;
- The prediction of the total lift and drag on a transonic wing-body configuration tested in several wind-tunnels;
- The design and analysis of a novel aerodynamic configuration similar to that of a blended wing-body;
- The proper installation of engines on the wings of an aircraft to avoid problems arising from the operation of thrust reversers;
- The safe operation of a military helicopter upon firing a missile whose exhaust could impinge on the airframe or the tail rotor;
- The packaging of electronic components and control unit motors to provide a suitable thermal environment and ensure reliable operation;
- The optimization of liquid fuel nozzles used in the industry; and
- Efforts to understand and suppress the noise produced by heavy artillery.
Today, many Defense companies are finding value in using CFD to find solutions to many difficult operational problems that, in the past, were too unwieldy to analyze with computational tools, and today may be prohibitively expensive by wind tunnel and other experimental techniques.
One client of Fluent’s, ATK Thiokol Propulson in the US can testify to the advantages of CFD. Andrew M. Eaton, the supervisor of their Gas Dynamics sections recently said, “ATK Thiokol Propulsion engineers have successfully used FLUENT in a variety of analyses that support safe and reliable design and operation of the ATK family of solid propellant rocket motors. Ranging from the small-scale study of gas flow in joint gaps with widths that are a fraction of an inch, to the analysis of internal motor flow fields with scales on the order of several feet, FLUENT offers a proven and reliable method for characterizing flow environments and providing heat transfer and structural load boundary conditions for component designers."
Fluent is the world leader in applying CFD to the defense industry and a further sample of CFD applications in the aerospace & defense industry can be found on:
For more information, contact rkh@fluent.com
Schematic representation of a Fighter Aircraft releasing missiles with simulated airflow “lines” around the missile bodies This illustrates the power of using the FLUENT CFD code to solve real-world aerodynamics problems.
