Predicting Transonic Buffet Onset for the Boeing SUGAR Mach 0.8 Transonic Truss-Braced Wing Aircraft

Speaker: Oliver Browne, Science and Technology Corporation, NASA Ames Research Center
February 1, 2024

Presentation

Abstract

The flow past the Boeing (SUGAR Mach 0.8 variant) Transonic Truss-Braced Wing (TTBW) aircraft is simulated with a Hybrid Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes Large-Eddy Simulations (HRLES) turbulence modeling approach to study transonic buffet onset and evaluate the predictive capability of the numerical approach. All simulations used structured overset curvilinear grids for the free-air configuration, with all simulations performed using the Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics (LAVA) computational framework. Aerodynamic loads and surface pressure obtained from the HRLES solutions are compared to results from unsteady RANS (URANS) and experiments conducted at NASA Ames 11-by-11-Foot Transonic Wind Tunnel. Overall good agreement is obtained in the predicted loads and surface pressure. Unsteady pressure data from HRLES and URANS simulations is utilized to compute power spectral density (PSD) to predict transonic buffet onset and compared to the Kulite data obtained from the experiment. Comparisons of the PSD spectrum also show reasonable agreement with the wind tunnel data, with HRLES and URANS predicting buffet onset at a slightly earlier angle-of-attack than the experiment.

This work was previously presented at the AIAA SciTech 2024 Forum in Orlando, FL – paper no. AIAA-2024-0065.

This work is supported by NASA ARMD’s Advanced Air Transport Technology (AATT) and Transformational Tools and Technologies (T³) projects.

Biography

Oliver Browne is a Senior Research Scientist at NASA Ames Research Center in the Launch, Ascent, and Vehicle Aerodynamics (LAVA) group within the Science and Technology Corp./Computational Aerosciences Branch. He received his B.Eng. degree in Aerospace Engineering from Coventry University and his M.Sc. in Aeronautical Engineering from Imperial College London. He received his Ph.D. in Aerospace Engineering from Universidad Politécnica de Madrid. From September 2016 until September 2020, he was a Postdoctoral Research Associate at the University of Arizona and University of Kentucky working on various projects related to developing numerical methods for hypersonic boundary-layer transition prediction. In September 2020, Oliver joined the LAVA group at NASA Ames where his work has focused on research (code development and applications) into turbulence modeling, in particular Hybrid RANS/LES, which has included working on the High Lift Prediction Workshop 4 (HLPW4) and Transonic Truss Based Wing (TTBW) projects.

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