Unsteady aerodynamics of wings in complex environments

大型民用飞机承受极端载荷，即在湍流和阵风期间。避免晴空湍流是一项巨大的挑战，而对流层和平流层下层亚声速机翼气动特性的突然不稳定湍流影响研究还不够。特别是，关于位于山谷中的机场周围的地形产生的湍流漩涡如何与爬升/下降的飞机相互作用的研究很少。这个项目的目的是研究CAT（或阵风）、飞机机翼和形成的尾流之间的相互作用。我们的目标是了解这些相互作用的潜在机制，并显著提高其预测的准确性，从而更好地评估CAT或阵风的风险。解决这些问题将有利于其他应用，例如在大风大气中运行的大型风力涡轮机，在极端复杂的城市环境中飞行的无人机，赛车前翼在前车产生的尾流中失去性能。该项目将使用计算流体动力学（CFD）方法来研究在巡航、起飞和着陆条件下大尺度湍流对飞机机翼性能特性的影响。数值模拟将使用南安普顿大学开发的CFD软件进行。

The large civil aircraft experiences extreme loads i.e., during turbulence and gusts. It is a great challenge to avoid clear-air turbulence (CAT), and the implications of sudden erratic turbulence on the aerodynamic characteristics of a subsonic wing in the troposphere and lower stratosphere have not been investigated enough. In particular, there is very little research into how turbulent eddies generated by the terrain that surrounds an airport located in a valley would interact with a climbing/descending aircraft. The aim of this project is to investigate the interactions between CAT (or gusts), the aircraft wing, and the formed wake flow. We aim to understand the underlying mechanisms for these interactions, and significantly enhance the accuracy of their prediction, and therefore to have a much better risk assessment of the CAT or gusts. Having tackled these problems will be beneficial to other applications, such as large wind turbines operating in gusty atmosphere, drones flying in extremely complex urban environments, front wings of race car loosing performance in wake generated by a preceding car.This project will use Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) approach to investigate the effects of large-scale turbulence on the performance characteristics of an aircraft wing during cruise, take-off and landing conditions. Numerical simulations will be carried out using the developed CFD software at the University of Southampton.