CFD Study of Solid Wind Tunnel Wall Effects on Wing Characteristics

Most of airplane structures include the components such as Fuselage, Wings, Empennage, Landing gear and Power plant etc. Wings are the important part of aircraft and these are airfoils attached to each side of the fuselage and are the main lifting surfaces that support the airplane in flight. SSD-2 airfoil, a modified version of NACA23015 airfoil is used to study the aerodynamic characteristics such as lift, drag, moment and wall effects with different wind tunnel blockage ratios. Generally, any new airfoil characteristics are derived from the extensive wind tunnel tests, however experiments are costly. Hence, to get the idea of aerodynamic characteristics and wall effects over airfoil with different wind tunnel blockage ratios, CFD tools are used such as ICEM CFD and ANSYS FLUENT. This paper presents the results of simulation of flow past SSD-2 airfoil. The study is carried out on a 2D airfoil section for free stream condition. Further the computations are made on 3D rectangular wing of solid wind tunnel simulation by varying wind tunnel height to get the different wind tunnel blockage ratios, keeping the other parameters constant. In solid wind tunnel simulation the lift and moment are less compared to free stream simulation results due to blockage effects. Finally, it is observed that increase in the wind tunnel blockage ratio, lift and moment decreases, drag increases with less difference in pressure; whereas decrease in wind tunnel blockage ratio, the lift and moment increases, drag decreases with more difference in pressure.