Numerical Study of Wave Effect on Aircraft Water-Landing Performance
Source abstract
Abstract
Aircraft, such as amphibious planes, airliners, helicopters and re-entry capsules, are frequently subject to impacting loads from water-landing/ditching on various free surfaces, especially under wave conditions. Understanding and quantifying the water-landing/ditching performance on wave surfaces are of fundamental important for the design and certification of crashworthiness in the field of aerospace engineering. This study aims to numerically assess the effect of wave surface on water-landing process of an amphibious aircraft. The numerical implementation is realized in Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) framework by combining finite volume method (FVM), volume of fluid (VOF) approach and velocity-inlet wavemaker. The temporal-spatial characteristic of numerical wave and the accuracy of presented model are, respectively, validated by analytical wave and convergence studies. The aircraft landing simulations with different free surface conditions, i.e., calm water, regular wave with different wave heights are then performed and quantitatively compared through several physical parameters, including acceleration, velocity, pressure, pitch angle and free surface deformation. It was found that the aircraft regular wave-landing process experiences several unique stages comparing with the calm-water-landing case. The results clearly confirm that wave surface can influence the aircraft landing performance to a great extent. The fundamental mechanism is found to be that the wave surface slope and wave particle velocity remarkably change the impacting position and effective impacting velocity of the aircraft.
Source: crossref · Quality: baseline
Research context
OpenAlex topics: Fluid Dynamics Simulations and Interactions · Fluid Dynamics and Heat Transfer · Ship Hydrodynamics and Maneuverability
SciVX discovery tags are terminology-based. OpenAlex topics are source-provided classifications.
Affiliations
College of Aerospace Engineering, Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Nanjing 210016, China
Key Aviation Scientific and Technological Laboratory of High-Speed Hydrodynamic, China Special Vehicle Research Institute, Jingmen 448035, China
National Research Council—Institute of Marine Engineering, 00128 Rome, Italy
Funding
Aeronautical Science Foundation of China · Nanjing University of Aeronautics and Astronautics
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