Computationally Efficient Calculation of Aerodynamic Flows

A method is presented to construct computationally efficient reduced order models (ROMs) of three dimensional aerodynamic flows around commercial aircraft components. The method is based on the proper orthogonal decomposition (POD) of a set of steady snapshots, which are calculated using an industrial computational fluid dynamics (CFD) solver. The POD-mode amplitudes are calculated minimizing a residual defined from the Euler equations, which makes the ROM independent of the peculiarities of the CFD solver. Also, both POD modes and the residual are calculated using only a limited number of points in the computational mesh. In spite of these simplifications, the method provides quite good approximations of the flow variables distribution in the whole computational domain, including the boundary layer and the wake. The method is tested considering the aerodynamic flow around a horizontal tail plane in the transonic range and proves to be robust and efficient.