External Store Separation Analysis Using Moving and Deforming Mesh Method

Abstract

A military aircraft generally includes external stores such as fuel tanks or external arming, depending on the purpose of the operation. When a store is dropped from a military aircraft at high subsonic, transonic, or supersonic speeds, the aerodynamic forces and moments acting on the store can be sufficient to send the store back into contact with the aircraft. This can cause damage to the aircraft and endanger the life of the crew. In this study, time accurate computational fluid dynamics (CFD) with dynamic moving grid (moving and deformable mesh, MDM) technique has been used to accurately calculate store trajectories. For the verification of the present numerical approach, a wind tunnel test model for the wing-pylon-finned store configuration has been considered and analyzed. The comparison results for the ejected store trajectories between the present numerical analysis and the wind tunnel test data at the Mach number of 0.95 and 1.2 are presented. It is also importantly shown that the numerical parameter of MDM technique gives significant effect for the calculated store trajectory in the low-supersonic flow such as Mach 1.2.