Simulations of transonic flow fields around an elastic arrow wing

Abstract

Transonic flows are characterised by the presence of adjacent regions of subsonic and supersonic flow, usually with shock waves present at the downstream supersonic-subsonic interface. An in-house fortran90 computer code, tranflow3d, which is robust and capable of simulating complex nonlinear flow fields around a double-swept-back semispan supersonic transport wing model (of high sweep angle) at transonic speeds is presented. The code has acceptable turnaround times on current high performance personal computers. The flow is governed by the general frequency, nonlinear, transonic small disturbance equation, subject to nonreflecting, far field, boundary conditions. Numerical solution procedure based on finite difference method, method of false transients and approximate factorisation technique is utilised. Chordwise distributions of steady pressure coefficient and local Mach numbers are computed, and compared with those obtained from wind tunnel measurements.