|
|
|
|
In honor of the 100th anniversary of the Wright Brothers first flight, Cislunar Aerospace, Inc. chose to do a simple demonstration of Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) using the 1903 Wright Flyer as our model. Here we present an Euler solution of the Wright Flyers lifting and control surfaces.
A copy of the 1903 Wright Flyer blue-prints were purchased from the
Smithsonian Air and Space Museum. These blue-prints provide all the
information needed to get the surface geometry of the Wright Flyer.
In order to save time and and computer memory, we assume that the
Wright Flyer is bi-laterally symmetric, so that we only need to create
a computation grid for half the aircraft. A plane of symmetry is then
added as a boundary condition to the computation in order to simulate
a full aircraft.
|
|
|
|
|
|
With Gridgen, a CAD/grid generation application, we were able to transcribe the Wright Flyer's dimensions from the blue-prints to the computer, and create a paneled definition of the Wright Flyer's wings, canards and rudders. We then used a hyperbolic grid generation package called Overgrid to march out surface and volume grids to create a structured overset grid system, as shown below. The resulting grid system consists of 16 grids and a total of 827,919 points.
|
|
The solver used to get an Euler solution was Overflow v1.7. Even with the low mach-number preconditioning schemes in Overflow v1.7 it was difficult to run this case in a reasonable amount of time at a mach number of 0.03. As a result, we ran the Wright Flyer simulation at a mach number of 0.2. On a Pentium II 333mhz system running Linux in single precision the solution took aproximately 30 hours to run. Shown below are plots of pressure near the center plane of the Wright Flyer.
|
|