Contra-Rotating Open Rotor (CROR) propulsion systems have seen renewed interest as an economic and environmentally friendly powerplant for future transport aircraft. Installation effects, i.e. the mutual interactions between airframe components and the rotors, have a pronounced impact on the aerodynamic and aeroacoustic performance for this type of engine. In the past five years, DLR’s Institute of Aerodynamics and Flow Technology has performed a number of numerical studies investigating important aspects relating to engine-airframe integration of CROR engines. In this article an overview of coupled aerodynamic and aeroacoustic simulations investigating representative pusher-configuration CROR engines will be given, focusing on the impact on aerodynamic performance and aeroacoustics caused by the presence of a pylon, the potential for noise reduction by employing trailing-edge blowing at the pylon trailing edge as well as the performance and noise variations caused by different senses of rotation of the rotors. It is shown that the interaction with the pylon strongly impacts blade performance and front rotor noise emissions but that the use of active flow control in the form of pylon trailing-edge blowing can alleviate these adverse installation effects to a notable extent.

Transonic flow past a Boeing 737 Outboard aerofoil and Whitcomb one with a defected aileron is studied. The flow simulation is based on the system of Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. The numerical study demonstrates the existence of free-stream conditions in which small perturbations produce abrupt changes of the lift coefficient. Also the simulation reveals adverse conditions in which aileron deflections have no influence on the lift.

A parameter-based study of a novel self-cleaning barrier filter concept for rotorcraft engines is presented. Existing engine inlet barrier filters for rotorcraft achieve a high separation efficiency (up to 99% for a dust resembling a coarse test dust) at the expense of a pressure drop that increases over time. Other engine protection devices with invariant pressure loss signals cannot offer the same level of efficiency. Furthermore, inlet barrier filters are absent on rotorcraft with larger mass flow demands, due to larger filtration area required. This work proposes a solution that addresses each of these limitations, and establishes the parametric framework upon which such a design could be realised. The drum-shaped self-cleaning barrier filter is affixed to the engine inlet and spins about its longitudinal axis, such that each of its fibrous filter pleats can be cleaned once per cycle. An initial increase of pressure loss gives way to a period of sustained invariance. The key parameters are the internal particle capacity of the chosen filter medium and the speed of rotation. Other design parameters can be optimised to yield minimum pressure drop for given set of flow conditions.

The development of adaptive morphing wings has been individuated as one of the crucial topics in the greening of the next generation air transport. Research programs are currently running worldwide to exploit the potentiality of morphing concepts in the optimisation of aircraft efficiency and in the consequent reduction of fuel burn. Among these, SARISTU represents the largest European funded research project which ambitiously addresses the challenges posed by the physical integration of smart concepts in real aircraft structures; for the first time ever, SARISTU will experimentally demonstrate the structural feasibility of individual morphing concepts concerning the leading edge, the trailing edge and the winglet on a full-size outer wing belonging to a CS-25 category aircraft. In such framework, the authors intensively worked on the definition of aeroelastically stable configurations for a morphing wing trailing edge driven by conventional electromechanical actuators. Trade off aeroelastic analyses were performed in compliance with CS-25 airworthiness requirements (paragraph 25.629, parts (a) and (b)-(1)) in order to define safety ranges for trailing-edge inertial and stiffness distributions as well as for its control harmonics. Rational approaches were implemented in order to simulate the effects induced by variations of trailing-edge actuators’ stiffness on the aeroelastic behaviour of the wing also in correspondence of different dynamic properties of the trailing-edge component. Reliable aeroelastic models and advanced computational strategies were properly implemented to enable fast flutter analyses covering several configuration cases in terms of structural system parameters. Already available finite elements models were processed in MSC-NASTRAN® environment to evaluate stiffness and inertial distributions suitable for the stick-equivalent idealisation of the reference structure. A parametric stick-equivalent model of the reference structure was then generated in SANDY3.0, an in-house developed code, that was used for the definition of the coupled aero-structural model as well as for the solution of aeroelastic stability equations by means of theoretical modes association in frequency domain.

Obtained results were finally arranged in stability carpet plots efficiently conceived to provide guidelines for the preliminary design of the morphing trailing-edge structure and therein embedded actuators.

In this study, a new aero-propulsive model (APM) was derived from the flight manual data of a transport aircraft using Genetic Algorithms (GAs) to perform accurate trajectory predictions. This new GA-based APM provided several improvements to the existing models. The use of GAs enhanced the accuracy of both propulsive and aerodynamic modelling. The effect of compressible drag rise above the critical Mach number, which was not included in previous models, was considered along with the effects of compressibility and profile camber in the aerodynamic model. Consideration of the thrust dependency with respect to Mach number and the altitude in the propulsive model expression was observed to be a more practical approach. The proposed GA model successfully predicted the trajectory for the descent phase, as well, which was not possible in previous models. Close agreement was observed when comparing the time to climb and time to descent values obtained from the model with the flight manual data.

Data mining is a data analysis process which is designed for large amounts of data. It proposes a methodology for evaluating risk and safety and describes the main issues of aircraft accidents. We have a huge amount of knowledge and data collection in aviation companies. This paper focuses on different feature selectwindion techniques applied to the datasets of airline databases to understand and clean the dataset. CFS subset evaluator, consistency subset evaluator, gain ratio feature evaluator, information gain attribute evaluator, OneR attribute evaluator, principal components attribute transformer, ReliefF attribute evaluatoboundar and symmetrical uncertainty attribute evaluator are used in this study in order to reduce the number of initial attributes. The classification algorithms, such as DT, KNN, SVM, NN and NB, are used to predict the warning level of the component as the class attribute. We have explored the use of different classification techniques on aviation components data. For this purpose Weka software tools are used. This study also proves that the principal components attribute with decision tree classifier would perform better than other attributes and techniques on airline data. Accuracy is also very highly improved. This work may be useful for an aviation company to make better predictions. Some safety recommendations are also addressed to airline companies.

This paper presents an integrated design and costing method for large stiffened panels for the purpose of investigating the influence and interaction of lay-up technology and production rate on manufacturing cost. A series of wing cover panels (≈586kg, 19·9m2) have been sized with realistic requirements considering manual and automated lay-up routes. The integrated method has enabled the quantification of component unit cost sensitivity to changes in annual production rate and employed equipment maximum deposition rate. Moreover the results demonstrate the interconnected relationship between lay-up process and panel design, and unit cost. The optimum unit cost solution when using automated lay-up is a combination of the minimum deposition rate and minimum number of lay-up machines to meet the required production rate. However, the location of the optimum unit cost, at the boundaries between the number of lay-up machines required, can make unit cost very sensitive to small changes in component design, production rate, and equipment maximum deposition rate.

A study was conducted on a GA(W)-1 wing in order to investigate the effect of testing inverted wings in ground effect at low Reynolds numbers. The wing was tested at a range of ground clearances and Reynolds numbers and results showed that the wing’s performance was dependent on both these parameters. Surface flow-visualisation and numerical simulation results highlighted the existence of a laminar separation bubble on the wing’s suction surface. The results also indicated that both the bubble’s length and the onset of separation were sensitive to ground clearance and Reynolds number. Attempts were made to minimise the wing’s Reynolds number dependency by using transition strips on the suction surface. The transition strip results highlighted the influence that a laminar separation bubble has on the overall performance of the wing and how its presence alters the force enhancement and reduction mechanisms on an inverted wing in ground effect.

King Abdul Aziz University of Saudi Arabia (KAU) and Tokai University in Japan have collaborated to design and manufacture a solar powered unmanned air vehicle (UAV), Sun Falcon, which has capability of continuous one day fight with intended design extension towards night flight. The project is a student-driven endeavour involving some 30 students. Both universities are equally involved in the actual design studies of the performance characteristics, aerodynamic design, propulsion and structural analysis. Tokai University is in charge of the actual on-site supervision and examination of on-going manufacturing processes and ultimate fabrication of the prototype model.

The conceptual design of the Sun Falcon was meticulously worked out in consideration of the operational mission, which included such flight characteristics as the cruising velocity, flight altitude, payload, flight time, rate of climb, power requirements and so on. The weather condition patterns in Saudi Arabia, which remained fairly supportive of the solar cell performance, were also deemed crucial in the design process. However, the design of a solar plane had other challenges in terms of power unit accommodation and payload consideration in comparison to other conventional UAVs. In this paper, an outline of the design features of the Sun Falcon is presented and other notable design features particular to solar UAVs are discussed. It was learnt in this exercise that the selection of the base aerofoil is perhaps one of the most important design items, as the Reynolds number for such UAVs understandably drops notably lower than conventional aeroplanes and such features as the camber curvature and wing area must cater for the installation of solar panels whose size, strength and quantity must respect local weather conditions. For the Sun Falcon, the actual design process examined two candidate aerofoils FX74-CL5-140 (FX74) and SD7037-092-88(SD7037) both of which were abundantly suitable for furnishing the required aerodynamic characteristics. SD7037 was ultimately chosen as it provided the best geometry and camber line in terms of accommodation and placement of the solar panels. Further scrutiny demonstrated that this latter aerofoil provided better take-off performance and superior L/D behaviour under cruise conditions. In order to check out the aerodynamic performance in general and overall stability and control characteristics, a preflight test under battery power (a 2,500 mAh li-po 4-cell 14·8v) was achieved on 4 June 2013. Other solar powered based tests are currently under way at present.

At DLR’s Institute of Propulsion Technology, the prediction tools and multi-disciplinary optimisation strategies developed for turbofan engines have been extended to contra-rotating open rotors (CROR). Thereby the objective has been to appraise and improve the performance of CROR engines and thus to reduce their environmental impact. The present paper reviews the intermediate progress achieved in this scope. The prediction is based on analytical and CFD methods and covers the fields of engine performance analysis, aerodynamics and acoustics. The aerodynamic and acoustic results could be partly validated through the comparison to experimental data obtained from wind-tunnel tests. In a multi-disciplinary approach the aforementioned aspects are optimised together. First results of an aero-acoustic optimisation are presented. Furthermore this paper undertakes some comparison between high-bypass ratio turbofan engines and open-rotor concepts.

A new rating scale for capturing pilot subjective assessment of simulation fidelity is described in this paper. The scale has been developed through a series of flight and simulation trials using six test pilots from a variety of backgrounds, and is based on the methodology utilised with the Cooper-Harper Handling Qualities Rating scale and the concepts of transfer of training, comparative task performance and task strategy adaptation. The development of the new rating scale has been undertaken using simulations of rotary-wing aircraft on the University of Liverpool’s HELIFLIGHT-R research simulator, in conjunction with the Canadian Flight Research Laboratory’s Bell 412 ASRA in-flight simulator. The utility of the scale applied to locating fidelity boundaries for quantitative metrics is illustrated for an inter-axis coupling criterion. The work described in this paper is preliminary in nature, and research activities are on-going to continue the validation of the fidelity rating scale.

The aerodynamic and aeroelastic behaviour of a rotor become more complex as advance ratios increase to achieve high-speed forward fight. As the rotor blades encounter large regions of cross and reverse flows during each revolution, strong variations in the local Mach regime are encountered, inducing complex elastic blade deformations. In addition, the wake system may remain in the vicinity of the rotor, adding complexity to the blade loading. The aeroelastic behaviour of a model rotor with advance ratios ranging from 0·5 to 2·0 has been evaluated with aerodynamics provided via a computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method. Significant radial blade-vortex interaction can occur at a high advance ratio; the advance ratio at which this occurs is dependent on the rotor configuration. This condition is accompanied by high vibratory loads, peak negative torsion, and peak torsion and in-plane loads. The high vibratory loading increases the sensitivity of the trim model, so that at some high advance ratios the vibratory loads must be filtered to achieve a trimmed state.

This paper presents the results of a study conducted at the Laboratoire de recherche en commande active, avionique et aéroservoélasticité, École de technologie supérieure, regarding the costs in fuel burn and pollutant emissions corresponding to a flight profile determined by a missed approach procedure. The evaluated missed approach flight profile starts at the point where the missed approach decision is made and ends at the same point, after the aircraft completes the missed approach procedure.

This study uses the fuel burn and pollutant emissions data for a Boeing 737-400 aircraft (chosen at random for this study), published by the European Environment Agency, and the standard flying cycle model elaborated by Group 08 of the Task Force on Emissions Inventories and Projections – a task force created by the United Nations Economic Commission for Europe (UN ECE)/the co-operative program for the monitoring and evaluation of the long-range transmission of air pollutants in the Europe (EMEP). The missed approach fight profile is based on the Area Navigation/Required Navigation Performance procedure for runway 13R of the King County International Airport/Boeing Field (BFI) in Seattle.

Four study cases are considered for the missed approach flight evaluation. These cases correspond to four navigation profiles – a combination of two lateral navigation profiles, one with a 20 nautical miles holding pattern and the other without, and two vertical navigation profiles. The results obtained for the missed approach flight profiles, in terms of fuel burn and emissions, are compared with the fuel burn and emissions reference data corresponding to a standard approach procedure and complete flights (from taxi out to taxi in).

The assumption that a zero-incidence flow around bodies of revolution is axisymmetric has been broadly adopted by many researchers, even for cases where the flow around such bodies becomes unstable. In this study, the validity of this assumption is revisited using CFD simulation. As a case study, the simulations of both stable and unstable hypersonic flows around spiked blunt bodies in 2D axisymmetric and full 3D computational domains are compared. It is found that, for the stable flow cases, the main flow features are apparently axisymmetric and the assumption is generally acceptable. However, some degree of asymmetry can be observed inside the shear layer in the separated region, causing small variation in the drag coefficient. For the unstable flow cases, the asymmetry of the flow features is much more significant. More importantly, the assumption that the flow is axisymmetric is found to overestimate the level of flow unsteadiness. The amplitude of temporal drag variation as predicted by the axisymmetric solution is higher than that predicted by the full 3D solution.

Dynamic stability data on axially symmetric pointed and blunt cones, parabolic profiles and other ogive and blunt cylindrical shapes is readily available in literature; the dynamic stability on elliptic blunt paraboloids has not been studied at any great lengths in the past. Both numerical and experimental results are scarce. The present paper uses the shock expansion method to obtain the unsteady pressure distribution on blunt elliptic conical bodies at small angles-of-attack. The resulting unsteady pressure distribution is suitably integrated over the surface of the elliptic body to obtain appropriate analytic expressions for static and dynamic stability. Owing to scarcity of meaningful numerical or measured data for elliptic bodies, the results are compared in qualitative terms against published dynamic stability data on pointed elliptical cones or other axisymmetric blunt cones.

A cockpit instrumentation system provides various elements of information for pilots. However, logical inference based on a cockpit instruments fault tree (FT) and reliability sometimes cannot give a correct diagnosis of failures. In addition, in flight control systems (FCS), a fault identification method based on the multiple-model (MM) estimator cannot find the basic fault cause. To deal with these problems, a hybrid approach which is capable of integrating inference and fault identification is proposed. In this approach, the event nodes of the FT which have correlations to the FCS are separated into modules. Each module corresponds to a fault mode of the FCS. To use these correlations, fault inference and the MM estimator can share fault diagnosis information. Simulation results show that the proposed approach is helpful in detecting the root cause of failure and is more correct than single fault diagnosis method.

An adaptive sliding mode guidance law guiding the line-of-sight angular rate to converge to zero was highly appraised. However, compared with the conventional proportional navigation law, adaptive sliding mode guidance law leads to large acceleration demand of the interceptor before the line-of-sight angular rate converging to zero, especially in a situation where the target has strong manoeuvrability as well as high velocity. In this paper, a strategy making the coefficients of the guidance law vary according to a fuzzy rule is proposed. Smaller guidance coefficients are selected at the beginning of the terminal guidance. Therefore, the guidance command is reduced and a smaller acceleration of the interceptor is incurred. As the coefficients grow to the fixed and desired values, the line-of-sight angular rate converges to zero rapidly, so that the convergence to the sliding surface is guaranteed. It is concluded that the fuzzy variable coefficients strategy is highly effective for tail-chase, head-on interception and head pursuit engagements as shown in the simulations.

In order to minimise drag, the front part of most modern glider fuselages is shaped so that laminar flow is preserved to a position close to the wing-to-fuselage junction. Experimental investigations on a full-scale JS1 competition glider however revealed that the laminar boundary layer in fact trips to turbulent flow at the fuselage-to-canopy junction position, increasing drag. This is possibly due to ventilation air leaking from the cockpit to the fuselage surface through the canopy seal, or that the gap is merely too large and therefore trips the boundary layer to turbulent flow. The effect of air leaking from the fuselage-to-canopy gap as well as the size of the gap was thus investigated with the use of computational fluid dynamics. It was found that if air was leaking through this gap the boundary layer would be tripped from laminar to turbulent flow. It was also found that the width of the canopy-to-fuselage gap plays a significant role in the preservation of laminar flow. If the gap is less than 1mm wide, the attached boundary layer is able to negotiate the gap without being tripped to turbulent flow, while if the gap is 3mm and wider, it will be tripped from laminar to turbulent flow. The work shows that aerodynamic drag on a glider can be significantly minimised by completely sealing the fuselage-to-canopy gap and by ensuring a seal gap-width of less than 1mm.

An aircraft and landing gear loads model was developed to assess the Margin of Safety (MS) in main landing gear components such as the main fitting, sliding tube and shock absorber upper diaphragm tube. Using a technique of Bayesian sensitivity analysis, a number of flight parameters were varied in the aircraft and landing gear loads model to gain an understanding of the sensitivity of the MS of the main landing gear components to the individual flight parameters in symmetric two-point landings. The significant flight parameters to the main fitting MS, sliding tube bending moment MS and shock absorber upper diaphragm tube MS include: longitudinal tyre-runway friction coefficient, aircraft vertical descent velocity, aircraft Euler pitch angle and aircraft mass. It was also shown that shock absorber servicing state and tyre pressure do not contribute significantly to the MS.

The ability to repair battle damage in a helicopter tail drive shaft (TDS) caused by small arms fire is a very important capability. A successful repair will enable the helicopter to continue its mission or at least allow it to return safely to base. This paper describes assessment of conventional and novel repair techniques using riveted metallic patches to restore the balance and strength of a damaged TDS. Analytical approaches are provided for the design of the repair. Modal analyses indicated that the effect of repair on change of the natural frequency of the TDS was negligible. An experimental testing program was conducted to validate the proposed repair methods. It has been demonstrated that the proposed repair methods achieved sufficient balance restoration by a defined repair procedure, assuming the unbalance could not be measured during a repair in the field. The conventional thin, single aluminium sheet, riveted repair significantly restored static strength. However, it only gave a fatigue life of 15hrs, and thus the repaired shaft may only be used for limited time for a military mission. The improved thick, two-half aluminium shell, riveted repair had sufficient static strength and met the 100-hour fatigue requirement.