Experimental and simulation Studies of a Two Seater Light Aircraft

Abstract

This paper presents the aerodynamic studies carried out on a three-dimensional aircraft model. The test model is a 15% scaled down from a two-seater light aircraft that close to the Malaysian made SME MD3-160 aircraft. The aircraft model is equipped with control surfaces such as flaps, aileron, rudder and elevator and it is designed for pressure measurement testing and direct force measurement using a 6-components balance system. This aircraft model has been tested at two different low speed tunnels, at Universiti Teknologi Malaysia tunnel sized 1.5 x 2.0 meter2 test section, and at Institute Aerodynamic Research, National Research Council of Canada sized 3 x 2 meter2 tunnel. The speed during testing at UTM and IAR/NRC tunnels was up to 70 meter/second, which is corresponds to Reynolds numbers of 1.3 x 106.The longitudinal and lateral directional aerodynamic characteristics of the aircraft such as coefficients of pressure, forces (lift, drag, side) and moments (roll, pitch and yaw) have been experimentally measured either using direct force measurement or pressure measurement method. The data reduction methods include the strut support interference factor using dummy image and the blockage correction have been applied in this project. The results showed that for the undeployed flap configuration, the stalling angle of this aircraft is 160 at CLMax = 1.05 measured by UTM - LST, compared to CLMax =1.09 at stalling angle 150 by IAR- NRC. Beside the experimental study, simulation also be performed by using a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code, FLUENT Version 5.3. Experimental works at UTM and IAR – NRC tunnel show that the aerodynamic characteristics of this light aircraft are in a good agreement with each other. Simultaneously, the aerodynamic forces obtained from experimental works and CFD simulations have been compared. The results proved that they are agreeable especially at a low angle of attack.