Averaging a half-mile per gallon might seem unfathomable to most drivers, but for aircraft carrying hundreds of passengers at high altitude, it’s a huge improvement in fuel efficiency. With the increasing demand for air travel over the past several decades, the use of renewable jet fuel also grows, which is more expensive than the petroleum-based kerosene it replaces.
Aviation companies are looking at technologies, shapes, and materials that would transform flight far more dramatically than current advances of the world’s most fuel-efficient commercial airliners. Besides improving aerodynamics and using lightweight composite materials, aerospace engineers are investigating ways to create a more flexible, adaptable aircraft wing design for peak fuel efficiency.
David Rodriguez and Michael Aftosmis have simulated a distributed flap system on the Endeavour supercomputer at the NASA Advanced Supercomputing (NAS) facility at Ames Research Center in California’s Silicon Valley. This flap system, called the Variable Camber Continuous Trailing Edge Flap was first developed by Nhan Nguyen, a senior research scientist with the Intelligent Systems Division at Ames. Using a standard NASA aircraft model, the researchers were able to determine which shapes work best at various flight conditions. In addition to finding the optimal shape for each condition, their goal was to determine how much better the reshaped wing would perform at each condition than the baseline wing design.
Dozens of full aerostructural optimizations were performed on Endeavour, equating to thousands of individual computational fluid dynamics simulations, with results showing improvements in aerodynamic performance and potential fuel savings in all of the simulation scenarios.
The Endeavor supercomputer is supported by the Advanced Air Transport Technology (AATT) project, under NASA’s Aeronautics Research Mission Directorate. For more information about Endeavor simulations for the distributed flap systems, visit:
http://www.nas.nasa.gov/publications/articles/feature_Flaps_VCCTEF_Aftosmis.html
Michelle MoyerNASA Advanced Supercomputing facility
Ames Research Center
Media Contact: Kimberly Williams
Ames Research Center
650-604-4789