Potential Flow Framework for Design of Aeropropulsive Geometries with Powered Wakes

Broadening interest by the aeronautics community in distributed electric propulsion systems has revealed a need for design and analysis methods capable of resolving the two-way coupling of aeropropulsive systems. A 2D, inviscid, and incompressible scheme to investigate the performance of these systems is described, which builds on prior, extensively used developments toward modeling airfoils in potential flow. The scheme incorporates a vortex panel method for multiple lifting geometries and iteratively solves for the circulation distribution and position of a powered jet wake that emanates downstream from a propulsive device, bounding the propulsive streamtube. The scheme is capable of resolving both the upper and lower wake boundaries, as well as the thickness of the surface elements. The code was mathematically verified, as well as experimentally validated with data from a quasi-two-dimensional wind tunnel model with an integrated nozzle. Experimentally acquired velocity field data were used to calculate the circulation distribution in the powered wake shear layers downstream of the model. These results, together with pressure distributions, are compared to code predictions. The numerical scheme demonstrated good computational characteristics and provided accurate predictions of an aeropropulsive system’s performance when the scheme’s assumptions were shown to hold throughout the flow domain of study.