空气动力学仿真

The development of high-lift systems is a major step in the design of modern aircraft and has a strong influence on the overall aircraft performance and cost. Many trade-offs must be considered, including performance, maximum lift, weight, cost, and noise. Today, the design and test of high-lift systems still requires many months of wind tunnel tests. Wind tunnel tests are costly and generally do not fully represent real flight conditions accurately — installation effects can influence the results, small-scale models cannot fully resolve all geometric details, and flight Reynolds and Mach numbers cannot be reproduced easily.

Solution Briefs

Finding the right trade-off between drag and weight is a key challenge in wing design. A thinner transonic wing has lower drag but will also be much heavier, which adversely affects the airplane performance. And as any passenger can see through an airplane window, the wing will deform under aerodynamic loads.

Solution Briefs

To maximize fuel efficiency and performance, vehicles are designed with minimum weight, which can reduce the cost of parts and directly reduces the engine power required for vehicle acceleration. However, the reduction of material from structural parts and body panels leads to reduced stiffness and increases the susceptibility of the parts to vibration, which might transmit noise to the vehicle interior.

Solution Briefs

Beyond fuel efficiency, aerodynamics affects the driver experience of vehicle handling. The forces and moments on the vehicle affect the grip that the tires have on the road, response of the vehicle to steering inputs, and stability of the vehicle to changes in the road or wind conditions. Vehicle handling attributes are strongly driven by transient effects.

Solution Briefs

Air is not the only medium encountered by a vehicle on the road. Vehicles must be designed to handle the sometimes harsh natural conditions found on the road, where water, snow, ice, dirt, rocks, and other particles of debris are kicked up off the road by tires or wind, or are present due to weather conditions. The small size of these particles dictates that they will be strongly influenced by vehicle aerodynamics. The exterior airflow around a moving vehicle drives the motion of particles around the vehicle until they hit the surface or are ingested into an air intake or other opening.

Solution Briefs