CFD SIMULATION OF LANDING OF AN AMPHIBIAN AIRCRAFT UNDER VARIOUS ATMOSPHERIC CONDITIONS

Abstract

An Amphibian or Amphibious Aircrafts are capable of landing and taking off on both - runways on land airports and water. Due to this versatile nature, an Amphibian Aircrafts has a great advantage over traditional aircrafts. Amphibian Aircraft are very useful for the countries like India as India has a very long coastline. Though not lot of research has been done in this field because of which the Amphibian Aircrafts are still lagging behind compare to Land Aircrafts. In this dissertation report an attempt has been made to model and simulate an Amphibian Aircraft during landing, cruising and take-off in water using CFD package OpenFOAM. Grumman G-21 Goose hull is modelled using SOLIDWORKS, also only half part of an Amphibian Aircraft is modelled and for the remaining half symmetry boundary condition are applied to reduce the computational time. The mesh which is used in this work is generated using OpenFOAM mesh generation capabilities which include BlockMesh utility and SnappyHexMesh utility. InterDyMFoam solver is used to solve the multiphase flow equation and in addition to that SixDoDRigidBodyMotion solver is used for the mesh deformation. To handle free surface of fluid multi-dimensional limiter for explicit solution (MULES) is used which implements Volume of Fluid Method (VOF). The turbulence model used in this work is k-o. Shear Stress Transport (SST) which comes under Reynolds-Average Navier- Stokes (RANS) model. The work in this dissertation is divided in three parts Landing, Cruising and Take-off where landing is the primary objective and other two are additional work. To get more accuracy Grid Independence study is also done using different level of grid refinement. In this dissertation work it is shown that how Amphibian Aircraft interact with water surface at different levels of their operation.