Experimental and Computational Investigation for In-Line Boundary Layer Ingestion

Abstract

The aerodynamic characteristics of an aft-body, in-line mounted, boundary layer ingesting, electric ducted fan, propulsion installation system has been investigated through experimental and computational analysis. A modular wind-tunnel model allows variation in the geometry of the propulsion installation system to be assessed, in combination with fan speed. Various experimental measurement techniques, including LDA, seven-holeprobe and surface pressures are employed. The propulsion installation system has also been investigated using RANS CFD and comparison with experimental data is presented. An investigation of the boundary conditions for efficiently representing the fan in CFD is described. Initial results show reasonably good agreement between CFD and experiment, in terms of velocity profiles and surface pressures, but highlight remaining differences for cases exhibiting flow separation.

Power Balance Analysis Experiments on an Axisymmetric Fuselage with an Integrated Boundary-Layer-Ingesting Fan

“…Previous experimental studies on the interaction between an axisymmetric fuselage and a downstream propeller focused on the wake-ingestion case, where the propulsor is placed far downstream of the body to avoid any pressure field interactions [7,21]. Recently, an experimental work on an axisymmetric-body with BLI proposed a benchmark for numerical modeling but did not investigate the aerodynamic field in great details [22]. Moreover, no examples of experimental implementation of the PBM on an axisymmetric BLI configuration are present in literature.…”