Assessment of the effects from the fuselage aft-body region in a Boundary Layer Ingestion airframe concept
Autor
Ashik Vincent Palathingal
Orientador
- Orientador Jesuino Takachi Tomita
Área de Concentração
Propulsão Aeroespacial e Energia
Data de Defesa
25/08/2021
Número da Tese
77982
Resumo
Bow1dary Layer Ingestion (BLI) is a promising green aviation technology. Previous research has shown that the fuselage aft-region of a BLI aircraft can be optimised to improve the efficiency of the aircraft. This is due to the lasses due to flow recirculation induced by the negative slope of the aft-region of the fuselage. The research is done in two phases. In the preliminary phase, curves of modified aft-geometries are generated and integrated with the fore-body and the cylindrical centre-body of the reference geometry. 2-D CFD simulations are run using these new geometries and compared with the reference case. The results from these simulations show that the decrease in the fuselage aft-region slope helps to improve the aerodynamics of the aircraft by reduction of flow separation and recirculation. These geometries are then used to generate three-dimensional geometries followed by the integration of the propeller. From the results of the CFD simulations of the propeller-integrated geometries, the propeller suction is found to be of no significant help in the prevention of the flow separation and recirculation. The modified cases however help in producing significant improvements compared to the reference case, in terms of flow distortion at the propeller inlet and outlet. The best case in this respect is the one with least aft-region slope. The performance efficiency, based on the net force on the entire aircraft and the ideal power consumption by the propeller, is seen to increase by 15 % for the best case.
