High Lift Aerodynamics with a Viscous-Coupled Panel Method Flow Solver

The activity described in this paper focuses on the current state-of-the-art in the use of a modern, viscous-coupled, surface-vorticity panel-method flow solver to the application of high-lift devices in aerospace vehicles. The motivation stems from the very fast computation abilities of such panel-method solvers and their enablement of conceptual and preliminary design of high-lift configurations. The work focuses on the NASA High-Lift PredictionWorkshop-5 Case-2 vehicle series. Four major configurations are investigated, with increasing levels of geometry complexity all the way up to full vehicle details. The paper discusses the simulation setup, performance, aerodynamic loads and moments comparison, as well as surface pressure comparisons with the NASA workshop datasets. Excellent computational performance has been recorded as part of this activity. Results show that such methodologies may be adopted for early-stage high-lift design studies.