Aerodynamics
The Aerodynamics Discipline designs the outer-mold-line (OML) of all of GTSC's vehicles. This is done by using industry standard design software to develop models of the aircraft, perform simulations using in-house developed code and CFD simulations, and further optimize the designs based on those results.
Shown below are the subteams within the Aerodynamics discipline and the various projects within them!
Subteams
The Aero-Design subteam is in charge of optimizing the design of the OML to meet the requirements of all GTSC aircraft. This includes using computational tools to study how changes in the geometry can alter the performance of the aircraft. The team works also closely with the structural design team to investigate how changes in the aircraft's mass properties affects its aerodynamic stability.
The Aero-Performance subteam aims to combine all computational models from the various disciplines to investigate the trajectory optimization of the aircraft. This helps inform pilot decisions to perform an optimal flight path, as well as inform the aircraft's initial sizing using energy-based methods literature. This team works heavily within code and works to generate various wrappers between our computational tools as well as output the performance metrics of the aircraft at various flight conditions.
Aero-Performance
AP Lead: TBD
Projects
Computational models and simulations can only take you so far, as all models are wrong and only some are useful. GTSC uses extensive wind tunnel campaigns to test our inlet performance as well as our vehicle performance at critical phases in our trajectory.
In order to simulate the flow over the aircraft, GTSC uses Siemens Simcenter Star-CCM+ to perform CFD simulations of the potential aircraft configurations at various flight conditions. This is a high-fidelity analysis tool, and when coupled with our low-fidelity tools we can further optimize our designs.