High-fidelity aerodynamic modeling of an aircraft using OpenFoam – application on the CRJ700

Abstract

This study is focused on the development of longitudinal aerodynamic models for steady flight conditions. While several commercial solvers are available for this type of work, we seek to evaluate the accuracy of an open source software. This study aims to verify and demonstrate the accuracy of the OpenFoam solver when it is used on basic computers (32–64GB of RAM and eight cores). A new methodology was developed to show how an aerodynamic model of an aircraft could be designed using OpenFoam software. The mesh and the simulations were designed only using OpenFoam utilities, such as blockMesh, snappyHexMesh, simpleFoam and rhoSimpleFoam. For the methodology illustration, the process was applied to the Bombardier CRJ700 aircraft and simulations were performed for its flight envelope, up to M0.79. Forces and moments obtained with the OpenFoam model were compared with an accurate flight data source (level D flight simulator). Excellent results in data agreement were obtained with a maximum absolute error of 0.0026 for the drag coefficient, thus validating a high-fidelity aerodynamic model for the Bombardier CRJ-700 aircraft.

Performance Comparison of CFD Microbenchmarks on Diverse HPC Architectures

“…Therefore, OpenFOAM is an object-oriented library that enables extensible 'user coding' to re-use individual components of meshing, linear system solvers, and discretization schemes in top-level solvers of complex physical models mapping partial differential equations in software [2]. OpenFOAM's applicability ranges from aerodynamic [3] and fluid flow [4] over manufacturing [5] to complex chemical engineering problems [6]. Proven useful on a range of compute resources to date, bottlenecks of OpenFOAM arise in current HPC systems identified by the exaFOAM project [7].…”