Study group report 2006: interpolation tool (Airbus)
This is the final report on the problem of interpolation for aircraft wing pressure data, brought to ESGI56 by Airbus. Click on the link at the bottom to download the full report as a pdf document.

Report authors
Darryl Almond (University of Bath)
Chris Budd (University of Bath)
Andrew Hill (University of Bath)

Introduction

Airbus UK is a centre of excellence for wing design. The aerodynamic group calculates the aerodynamic loads on wings for different Mach numbers and angles of attack, to pass on to the structures group. The pressure data is obtained from several sources.

• Wind tunnel experiments provide a good source of surface pressure data but are expensive and can provide only a limited number of measurements.
• CFD calculations are used to calculate the pressure data by solving the Navier-Stokes equations. These calculations take several hours to run.

The aerodynamic group cannot perform wind tunnel experiments for all required configurations, and neither can they perform CFD calculations for all configurations. Therefore they propose to combine the multiple data sources to obtain data for a large number of configurations with a high level of confidence. Thus the problem presented to the Study group is to find a suitable means of combining the data from wind tunnel experiments and CFD experiments.

Airbus supplied, for use at the Study Group, wing pressure coefficient data obtained from both wind tunnel experiments and CFD calculations; see Figure 2. The data covered a number of Mach numbers and angles of attack at discrete points along several eta stations on the upper and lower surfaces of the wing; see Figure 1.

Figure 1: Diagram describing the layout of the wing and chords.

Figure 2: An example of the surface pressure coefficient data supplied by Airbus, calculated using a CFD package.

Click on the link below to view the full report.

Download 'Airbus-InterpolationReport.pdf' (280 Kb).