Host: The Japan Society of Mechanical Engineers
Name : [in Japanese]
Date : March 14, 2019
In recent years, Kyushu Institute of Technology has been studying and developing experimental winged rocket to validate the necessary technology for the suborbital reusable transportation system. For the development of the suborbital winged rocket, it is necessary to solve the coupled design problem of the vehicle shape and flight trajectory. This means that the shape of the vehicle must be optimized while carrying out aerodynamic analysis and flight trajectory calculation in a wide range of flight conditions such as powered ascent, high angle-of-attack re-entry, gliding, and landing phases. Therefore, the application of efficient three-dimensional shape definition method and low-cost aerodynamic analysis method are essential. In this research, OpenVSP, an open source software for the parametric modeling of aircraft airframe is used for the design of the vehicle shape, and low-fidelity Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) calculation based on panel methods is used. The aerodynamic characteristics obtained from the low-fidelity CFD are compared with the wind tunnel test results, and the satisfactory accuracy of the low-fidelity CFD is revealed. The comparison is performed from subsonic to hypersonic speed regime, and the control surface deflection is also considered. Furthermore, high-fidelity Navier-Stokes CFD calculations is conducted as a preliminary study for accuracy improvement of aerodynamic analysis.
