Aerodynamic Numerical Simulation Analysis of Water–Air Two-Phase Flow in Trans-Medium Aircraft

Abstract

A trans-medium aircraft is a new concept aircraft that can both dive in the water and fly in the air. In this paper, a new type of water–air multi-medium span vehicle is designed based on the water entry and exit structure model of a multi-rotor UAV. Based on the designed structural model of the cross-media aircraft, the OpenFOAM open source numerical platform is used to analyze the single-medium aerodynamic characteristics and the multi-medium spanning flow analysis. The rotating flow characteristics of single-medium air rotor and underwater propeller are calculated by sliding mesh. In order to prevent the numerical divergence caused by the deformation of the grid movement, the overset grid method and the multiphase flow technology are used for the numerical simulation of the water entry and exit of the cross-medium aircraft. Through the above analysis, the flow field characteristics of the trans-medium vehicle in different media are verified, and the changes in the body load and attitude at different water entry angles are also obtained during the process of medium crossing.

Keywords

• trans-media aircraft
• multi-rotor drone
• multimedia spanning
• aerodynamics
• multiphase flow