Grant: Alliance Grants

Commercial air transport of passengers and freight is a significant and growing contributor to greenhouse gas emissions, with total emissions doubling since 1990, despite a 60% decrease in emissions per passenger-kilometer. Continuing this trend in flight efficiency is critical in the face of rapidly growing demand, and requires innovative design of new aircraft. Modern aircraft design, in turn, depends largely on highly accurate, reliable, rapid simulation of the aerodynamic forces that dictate the operating performance and flight envelopes of aircraft. Such simulations are the domain of computational fluid dynamics (CFD). In aerodynamics, CFD tools find application not just for large civilian passenger and cargo planes - the familiar offerings from Boeing, Airbus, and the like - but also for small scale guided and autonomous drones, mid-sized airplanes - including the Canadian-made de Havilland Dash 8 and Twin Otter - and military combat aircraft. This project seeks to make CFD simulations more accurate for a given amount of computational resources, enhancing the tools aerodynamicists use to develop next-generation aircraft. The overall goal of this collaborative project with Dr. Devina P. Sanjaya (University of Tennessee, Knoxville) is to harness the full potential of high-order adaptive CFD methods and support their wide-spread deployment in computational aerodynamics. From the point of view of aerospace engineers, this will reduce the amount of computational time and computer memory required for simulations, increasing throughput and allowing them to better understand and control the complex aerodynamic flows they work with daily. The immediate practical benefit to Canada from this collaborative project will be CFD software tools that will place the Canadian aerospace industry at the forefront of aircraft design optimizationthrough more accurate, efficient aerodynamic simulation. In particular, this project will benefit conventional Canadian aerospace companies, including Bombardier, de Havilland, and Bell Helicopter, as well as the increasing number of small companies working to develop piloted and autonomous drones for commercial applications.