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Modeling Aerodynamic Flows in Computational Fluid Dynamics

Since the late 1960s, the capabilities of computers and computational fluid dynamics (CFD) codes, and our knowledge of how to use them, have all grown tremendously. Over that time, CFD-based analysis, design, and optimization methods have revolutionized the practice of aerodynamics.

In some applications (e.g., the design of the cruise configuration of a transport airplane), knowledgeable use of CFD can now routinely produce good designs that don't need further refinement in the wind tunnel, only verification. For such applications, the role of wind-tunnel testing has changed from the screening of many candidate designs to the detailed evaluation of just a few. For applications where the geometry and/or the flow physics are more complicated (e.g., design of high-lift systems, or the analysis of off-design flight conditions), the wind tunnel still plays a major role in design development, but it will diminish as CFD capabilities advance.

CFD offers decided advantages over the wind tunnel in several ways. With CFD, we can explore a much larger number of design geometry variations than it is practical to test in the wind tunnel. And of course CFD can be run without interference from wind-tunnel walls or model supports. CFD can model full-scale Reynolds numbers, which in wind-tunnel testing is possible only in very expensive cryogenic pressure tunnels. With some additional computational effort and coupling with a structural ...

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