The aeronautical industry, more precisely the aircraft manufacturing sector, is a demanding business area in which the design development cycles are continuously shrinking whilst the technical requirements are becoming more stringent due to the fierce competition. The present work considers the adoption of the multidisciplinary design optimization concept, which is also known by the MDO acronym, as a way of adapting to this new reality. In the MDO concept, the design is performed in a concurrent fashion through the integration of the engineering processes in environments know as ``frameworks';';. The work presents the development of a set of tools that can be adopted as numerical procedures inside existing frameworks or they can be coupled to create the basic structure of an open MDO framework, focused in aeronautical engineering and with special attention to aerodynamic design problems. These tools are embedded in different modules and they are employed in a series of study cases focused in aeronautical applications. These studies have shown how aspects associated with the choice of the geometrical parameterization and the upper and lower range limits of the parametric variables can yield different geometries during the optimization process. Moreover, the present work shows that only those geometric parameterizations that consider high order polynomials can guarantee that the same final geometry is achieved at the end of the optimization process. The increase in the polynomial order leads to optimized solutions with lower drag coefficients. The aerodynamic optimizations performed with a neural network have shown the benefits that the approximation methods can provide in terms of computational cost. The complete set of tools developed during this work can contribute to improve the capability of the Computational Fluid Dynamics group at Instituto de Aeronáutica e Espaço (IAE) and at Instituto Tecnológico de Aeronáutica (ITA) by the incorporation of this open environment for analysis and multidisciplinary optimizations. These tools can become an initial structure focused in a collaborative research activity between academia and industry.

This work presents the results of shock tunnel tests of a Mach 10 waverider with sharp leading edges. The waverider surface was generated from a conical flowfield with the volume and the viscous lift-to-drag ratio as optimization parameters. A compression and expansion ramps were added to the pure waverider surface in order to simulate the flow over a scramjet engine. The compression ramp was designed so as to provide the ideal conditions for the supersonic combustion of the Hydrogen while the expansion section was derived from an ideal minimum length supersonic nozzle. The experimental data included Schlieren photographs of the flow and the pressure distribution over the compression surface. These data were compared with the inviscid theory. During these investigations, the IEAv's T3 shock tunnel was used to simulate the hypersonic flow. The stagnation conditions as well as the free stream properties were estimated using numerical codes. The tunnel operated at Mach number ranges of 8.9 to 10, Reynolds number from 2.25 x 106 to 8.76 x 106 (m-1) and Knudsen number from 0.06 to 0.19. From the Schlieren photographs it was noted that the inlet flowfield behaves according to the predictions of the hypersonic viscous interaction models. Also, the pressure variation along the compression surface centerline was obtained using piezoelectric pressure sensors. The resulted profile presented the general trend of the flow described by these models.

As caudas-T constituem uma importante configuração aerodinâmica e estrutural presente em muitos jatos executivos, aeronaves comerciais e principalmente grandes cargueiros. Devido às suas características dinâmicas, as caudas-T tendem a ser mais críticas com relação ao flutter do que as caudas convencionais. Por isso foram realizados estudos paramétricos acerca do enflechamento, rigidez em torção e flexão da empenagem vertical, posição da linha elástica, momento de inércia de massa, rigidez em arfagem e outros que mostraram a sensibilidade da velocidade de flutter a cada parâmetro e sua relevância em um projeto. As forças estáticas atuantes na empenagem horizontal devidas ao ângulo de trimagem do estabilizador alteram significativamente o comportamento aeroelástico de uma cauda-T. Softwares de análise de flutter difundidos na indústria aeronáutica como o MD/Nastran falham em não considerar as forças de sustentação estática. No decorrer deste trabalho buscou-se compreender por que o fenômeno da sustentação estática influencia tanto na velocidade de flutter de uma cauda-T. Também foram levantados quatro métodos distintos que levam em conta este fenômeno nos cálculos aeroelásticos. Um deles foi escolhido e implementado num modelo genérico de cauda-T empregando o software MD/Nastran. Os resultados mostraram que a velocidade de flutter, em alguns casos, pode ser reduzida em mais de 20% por conta do efeito da sustentação estática. A tendência de comportamento do modelo aeroelástico com sustentação estática foi comparada a experimentos da literatura e houve concordância aceitável. Paralelamente, estudou-se o efeito do diedro da empenagem horizontal no flutter e foi constatado que as cargas aerodinâmicas provenientes de diferentes diedros são as principais responsáveis por mudanças significativas no flutter. A deformação estática do estabilizador também causa mudança temporária de diedro, o que pode agravar o acoplamento de flutter da cauda-T. Estes são os principais aspectos abordados neste trabalho.

The objective of the present research work consists in studying complex aerodynamic flows about typical aerospace configuration, in which turbulence effects play a fundamental role. Such study is performed with an available computational tool that is being developed at CTA/IAE. This is a finite-volume code for unstructured 3-D meshes that solves the compressible Reynolds-averaged Navier-Stokes equations. Turbulence effects are added to this numerical tool through turbulence models. Similar work had already been initiated by the author in his master thesis at ITA with less advanced model in that context. Turbulence effects are critical for complex aerospace configurations, such as supercritical or high-lift aerofoils, or space vehicles at atmospheric transonic or supersonic flight, and less advanced turbulence models fail to adequately describe such flows. The investment in more complex turbulence models, such as {em nonlinear} eddy viscosity and Reynolds-stress transport closures, is of fundamental importance to better capture such flows, which are very important in the context of the developments within the aerospace area at CTA/IAE and Embraer. Furthermore, in order to allow for a robust and efficient numerical framework, effort is also driven towards convergence acceleration techniques such as multigrid and variable time stepping procedures, as well as convective flux computation schemes suitable for boundary layer and shocked flows. These flux schemes must be robust and accurate even for highly stretched meshes that support these flow phenomena at reasonable computational costs. The validation of these new implementations, for the applications of interest, is performed by comparison of numerical results with experimental or theoretical data for several flow cases. Flows involving laminar boundary layers and shock waves are used to assess the quality of the convective flux computation schemes. Traditional turbulent-flow validation cases, such as the turbulent boundary layers over a flat plate or within a parallel-wall channel, are considered to address the level of physical representativeness of the chosen models. Finally, typical aerospace flows are evaluated with the best numerical settings resulting from the previously mentioned efforts. Such cases involve transonic and high-lift aerofoils, and transonic and supersonic flows about a space vehicle. In general, good agreement of numerical results with the reference data is obtained.

A study of the flowfield around axisymmetric launch vehicles in different flight conditions and configurations is performed in this work. Particularly, the VLS second stage flight configuration is analyzed considering the case with and without a propulsive jet in the vehicle base. Among the different cases considered for this configuration there are inviscid as well as viscous turbulent flows. The study is performed using a finite volume cell centered formulation on unstructured grids. Different spatial discretization schemes are compared, including a centered and an upwind scheme. The upwind scheme is a second-order version of the Liou flux vector splitting scheme and a simple scalar advection test problem is used to assess the influence of different reconstruction and limiting methods in the second-order extension of the scheme. Turbulence effects are accounted for using two one-equation turbulence closure models, namely the Baldwin and Barth and the Spalart and Allmaras models. An agglomeration multigrid algorithm is used to accelerate the convergence to steady state of the numerical solutions. Mesh refinement procedures as well as hybrid and adaptive meshes are discussed.

Simulações dos escoamentos aerodinâmicos sobre um foguete de sondagem típico são apresentadas. Freqüentemente, os foguetes de sondagem utilizam mais de um conjunto de empenas e necessitam que essas empenas possuam um tamanho razoável. A fim de lidar com esse tipo de configuração, o presente trabalho faz uso de uma nova metodologia, que combina simultaneamente malhas multibloco Chimera e justapostas na discretização do domínio computacional. Os escoamentos de interesse são modelados utilizando as equações de Euler em três dimensões e o trabalho descreve os detalhes dos procedimentos de discretização, os quais utilizam uma abordagem de diferenças finitas para malhas estruturadas multibloco que se conformam ao corpo simulado. O método é utilizado para calcular a aerodinâmica de um veículo de sondagem atualmente em desenvolvimento. Os resultados indicam que a presente metodologia pode ser uma ferramenta poderosa de análise aerodinâmica e de projeto.

The objective of this project is to study three dimensional aerodynamic flows over realistic aerospace configurations, such as the first Brazilian Satellite Launcher (VLS) in its first stage flight form. In order to achieve this objective, computational fluid dynamics and three dimensional adaptive mesh refinement techniques are used. The project focus in finite element and finite volume techniques to simulate the flows of interest. Both the Taylor-Galerkin finite element method and the Jameson finite volume method are used in the simulations. A new interpretation of MacCormack's method in an unstructured grid context is presented. The analysis, implementation and validation of the adaptive mesh refinement tools in the present context is part of the work developed. The use of meshes with hanging-nodes in a finite volume code is also described. The Spalart and Allmaras turbulence model is implemented in the finite volume code in order to account for turbulent effects. In the first part of this project, inviscid flows over the VLS ranging from subsonic to supersonic regime are studied using the finite element and finite volume techniques and, in the following part, turbulent viscous flow cases are analyzed using the finite volume code.