23rd Congress of International Council of the Aeronautical Sciences, 8-13 September, 2002, Toronto, Canada
Paper ICAS 2002-2.4.3

X-31A VECTOR HIGH ANGLE OF ATTACK DESCENT EULER AND NAVIER-STOKES SIMULATIONS OF UNSTEADY MANOEUVRES

S. M. Hitzel, E. Van Der Weide, U. Tremel, H. Rieger
EADS Deutschland GMBH Military Aircraft Unit, Germany

Keywords: x-31a vector, high angle of attack, thrust vectoring, ground effect, unstructured meshes, numerical simulation

The X-31A VECTOR high angle of attack descent manoeuvre is performed in close proximity to the ground and controlled by the application of conventional controls together with a thrust vectoring system. Selected conditions of these manoeuvres were chosen for steady Navier-Stokes simulations in unstructured hybrid computational grids. Unsteady motions of the aircraft and the thrust vector system were performed in Euler-simulations to save on the computational effort due to the neglect of viscous effects. Some aspects of the unstructured grid generation will be discussed. The DLR-TAU code was used as Navier-Stokes solver on multiprocessor machines. The unsteady simulations were performed with the AIRPLANE+-code in the framework of a simulation control tool. Here, this tool guides the aircraft configuration through the flight path evaluated from flight simulation tests.

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