21st Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Melbourne, Australia, 13-18 September, 1998
Paper ICAS-98-2.1.2

ONERA ACTIVITIES ON SUPERSONIC TRANSPORT AIRCRAFT AERODYNAMICS

Thibert J. J., Duveau R., Crenon P., Lemee P., Thepot R.
ONERA, France

Keywords: suprsonic, transport aircraft, aerodynamics, onera

During these last few years ONERA activities on supersonic transport aircraft aerodynamics have been oriented towards CFD code assessment for performance prediction and in particular for the drag, the development of numerical optimisation tools for multipoint designs, drag reduction technology investigations and air intake aerodynamics. Euler and boundary layer codes are able to predict the general features of the flow for all the flight conditions. Accuracy of the drag prediction is satisfactory in supersonic but not so good in transonic. At low speed and high angle of attack Euler solutions suffer from too much artificial dissipation. Numerical optimisation techniques are able to deal with a great number of design variables and are powerful tools for multipoint designs. Several design exercises have demonstrated the capabilities of this method to significantly improve current designs. Drag reduction technologies can also be foreseen for application on a supersonic transport aircraft. In particular riblets are efficient for reducing the skin friction drag. Laminar flow control is not very powerful with the actual wing shapes and would need specific design as well as efficient systems to avoid leading edge contamination. CFD tools are also able to predict correctly air intake performances near adaptation but they have still to demonstrate their capacities for off-design situations as well as for the internal shock control system design.

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