Research on Ground Effect of Shipborne Flying-Wing UAV

The ground effect of aircraft has been well studied in recent decades. However, available studies (inclusive of test techniques) are all carried out based on quasi-steady methods, without considering the effects of the time course on the flow field. That is, the status of every time point is independent from each other, and the flow field of the current point has no effect on its next one. In this paper, the problem of unsteady ground effect of flying wing UAV is solved by using the computational fluid dynamics (CFD) method, where the dynamic laying method is adopted to generate moving grid caused by the relative motion of aircraft and aircraft carrier deck, and Euler equation is calculated to simulate the unsteady flow field. Finally, computational results show that the force and moment under unsteady conditions is more close to the real physical phenomenon while comparing with quasi-steady methods.