CFD Study of High-Lift Devices

Abstract

High lift devices are an essential part of the wing of an aircraft as they can provide a significant increase in lift and the stall angle of the wing, enabling planes to fly safely in situations like takeoff and landing. The design of effective high-lift devices is crucial to the improvement of current aircraft and their development can be simplified by computational fluid dynamics methods. The goal of this project was to study the effect of different high-lift devices on the flow over an aerofoil and to assess the validity of CFD simulations of high-lift flows. The tested configurations include multi-element aerofoils with a leading edge slat and/or a trailing edge Fowler flap, as well as a single-element aerofoil. In order to perform the study, computational models were created using ANSYS Fluent and tested at a range of angles of attack. An unstructured mesh, a Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes solver and the Spalart-Allmaras turbulence models were used. Overall, the results show good agreement between the characteristics of high-lift flow and the expected results, as well as previous experiments. However, the model failed to accurately calculate the lift generated by the aerofoils at high angles of attack. As a result, future studies are recommended to effectively model the flow around aerofoils in high-lift configurations. These studies should include different types of computational mesh, turbulence models and three-dimensional calculations.