CFD Technology Development

Over the last thirty years, the Computational Aerodynamics team has played a significant role in advancing the state-of-the-art in CFD technologies; particularly in developing capability for modelling flows around complete aircraft.  A number of high profile successes have been achieved including:

• Development and support of a full-potential wing / body code, which has been extensively used in civil aircraft wing design
• Development of the world's first three-dimensional, block-structured mesh generation capability, used widely in aerodynamic research studies
• Development of the world's first hybrid block-structured / unstructured CFD system, SAUNA
• Collaboration in the development and support of the state-of-the-art SOLAR CFD system for rapid-response, Reynolds-Averaged Navier-Stokes predictions
• Integration and industrial deployment of SOLAR meshing with the TAU flow solver developed by DLR

CFD Techniques

The broad range of code development skills within the Computational Aerodynamics team have been applied to all parts of the CFD process including:

• Grid generation - structured, unstructured, hybrid, dynamic meshes
• Flow physics - Euler, RANS, coupled boundary layer, turbulence modelling, LES/DES, unsteady flow, flow control
• Post-processing - grid analysis, flow visualisation, feature extraction, aerodynamic performance data prediction 

As well as CFD, our skills in engineering and scientific software development have been harnessed in other disciplines such as:

• Computational Aeroacoustics (CAA)
• Aeroelastic Coupling

Collaborative Development

As well as liaising with academia to develop fundamental advances in CFD technologies, the Computational Aerodynamics team also collaborates closely with a number of other research establishments and industrial partners across Europe.