Journal of Aeronautics & Aerospace Engineering
Open Access
ISSN: 2168-9792
+44-77-2385-9429
ISSN: 2168-9792
+44-77-2385-9429
Ramesh K Agarwal
Washington University in St Louis, USA
Keynote: J Aeronaut Aerospace
The Wing In Ground Effect (WIG) aircraft operates with larger lift to drag ratio compared to a conventional aircraft at low subsonic Mach numbers. To increase the traffic volume of the WIG aircraft, one possible way is to increase the flight speed, which can result in transonic flow. Currently, the studies on the transonic flight in ground effect are very few. The focus of this paper is to study aerodynamics and flow physics of a typical transonic RAE2822 airfoil at Angles of Attack (AOA) from 0 to 12 deg. and Mach numbers from 0.5 to 0.8 in ground effect by varying the ground clearance above the ground. The compressible Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes equations with Spalart-Allmaras (SA) turbulence model are solved using the commercial Contract for difference (CFD) solver ANSYS Fluent. For flight near the flat ground surface, some interesting shock formations and flow phenomenon are obtained due to transonic flow. For the unsteady shock buffet phenomenon on the upper surface, the buffet boundary in the Angle of Attack (AOA) Mach number (Ma) plane shrinks with the decreasing ground clearance. Compared to the unbounded flow field, there exists a steady shock on the lower surface of the airfoil in ground effect for low AOAâ??s because the channel between the lower surface of the supercritical airfoil and the ground is a typical convergingdiverging shape, resulting in the decrease in lift and increase in drag. For extreme conditions of very small ground clearance, small AOA and high Mach numbers, a new coupling between the shock buffets on the lower and the upper surface of the airfoil is observed. The unsteady aerodynamics of transonic flow in the presence of a wavy ground is also analyzed.
Ramesh K Agarwal received PhD from Stanford University in 1975 and post-doctoral training at NASA’s Ames Research Center in 1976. From 1976 to 1994, he was the Program Director and McDonnell Douglas Fellow at McDonnell Douglas Research Laboratories in St. Louis. From 1994 to 2001, he was the Sam Bloomfield Distinguished Professor and Executive Director of National Institute for Aviation Research at Wichita State University in Wichita, KS. He is currently the William Palm Professor of Engineering at Washington University in St. Louis. He is the author/co-author of nearly 250 archival papers and over 500 conference papers. He is on the editorial board of 20+ journals. He is a Fellow of eighteen societies including AIAA, ASME, ASEE, SAE, IEEE, APS and AAAS among others. He is the recipient of many honors and awards.
E-mail: rka@wustl.edu