22nd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, Harrogate, UK, 28 August - 1st September, 2000
Paper ICAS 2000-5.6.1
ACFD APPLICATIONS TO STORE SPARATION - STATUS REPORT
A. Cenko (1), M. Lutton (2)
(1) United States Naval Academy, Annapolis, USA;
(2) Air Force Seek Eagle Office, Eglin AFB, Fla., USA
Keywords: acfd, store separation
During the past decade, the Navy has considerably
improved its capabilities in aircraft/weapon
integration. In 1989 it took more than 400 hours
of wind tunnel testing, which cost 1,5000,000,
and 20 flights1 to clear the JSOW from the F-18
to Mach 0.95. This year the MK-83 JDAM was
cleared after only 60 hours of wind tunnel testing
and five flights to the full F-18 aircraft envelope
of Mach 1.3. This reduction occurred because
the Navy not only learned to test smarter, but also
developed an integrated approach2 to Modeling
& Simulation (M&S), wind tunnel and flight
testing which allowed lessons learned on previous
programs to be applied to new ones.
However, the present approach still requires a
fairly large commitment of time and financial resources
to accomplish the mission.
The present approach has optimized the use
of available resources; any further gains will have
to come not by improving existing techniques,
but by bringing new resources into the process.
Several years ago the Office of the Secretary
of Defense (OSD), under the Central Test and
Evaluation Investment Program (CTEIP) funded
a tri-service research project termed Applied
Computational Fluid Dynamics (ACFD) for store
separation. This project is meant to provide
analysis tools that effectively use Computational
Fluid Dynamics (CFD) for store certification
analysis. ACFD will provide the needed tools
that will reduce DOD dependence on wind tunnel
and flight-testing.
ACFD is not intended to replace the wind
tunnel in the near future; rather it will be used to
determine the critical regions of the flight envelope
to help structure the wind tunnel test, and to
explain any wind tunnel anomalies and help
structure the flight test program. The objective
of the program is to provide upgraded analysis
tools that will support store certification requirements
at less cost and in less time.
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