Eventos Anais de eventos
COBEM 2023
27th International Congress of Mechanical Engineering
Development of a subscale aircraft of a Cessna 177
Submission Author:
Clécio Fischer , SP
Co-Authors:
Clécio Fischer, Éder Alves de Moura, ROBERTO GIL ANNES DA SILVA, Luiz Carlos Góes
Presenter: Clécio Fischer
doi://10.26678/ABCM.COBEM2023.COB2023-1535
Abstract
The use of subscale aircraft for aerodynamic, stability, and control testing is generally used for aircraft design studies. Subscale aircraft can be used in free flight testing for aircraft dynamics testing, which is a relatively simple and low-cost technique compared to others, such as wind tunnel testing, which is expensive and difficult to perform. Some limitations regarding the accuracy of results in free flight tests are that external factors such as air currents and atmospheric turbulence can affect the subscale aircraft. Free flight subscale models are an alternative for dynamic wind tunnel testing and dynamic sizing. Several techniques can be used to design a subscale aircraft for dynamic testing, and it is a topic that has been studied and used by the industry for decades. One of the techniques is the Froude number scaling, used when one intends to predict the behavior of an aircraft in different flight conditions, from the flight at low take-off and landing speeds to the flight at high cruising speed. The Froude number is generally defined as the ratio of speed to the square root of the aircraft span, length, and gravity limitation. This work will present the development of a subscale aircraft of the Cessna 177 Cardinal, capable of performing tests in free flight and a wind tunnel. This aircraft was chosen because in the 1970s NASA (National Aeronautics and Space Administration) carried out the instrumentation of this aircraft and carried out a flight to collect data which culminated in the document "Flight Test Data for a Cessna Cardinal" which presents the results of these tests. The technique of scaling by Froude number will detail all the criteria used to determine the scale factor in the flight conditions that the aircraft will be subjected to, finally, the results obtained in wind tunnel testing will be presented, and the obtained for Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) simulation and the CLα and Cmα curves.
Keywords
Subscale Aircraft, Froude Number, Free flying test, Wind Tunnel, CFD
