Unsteady aerodynamics of wings in complex environments

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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.