Summary of Flow Modulation and Fluid-Structure Interaction Findings

The Collaborative Research Center SFB 401: Flow Modulation and Fluid-Structure
Interaction at Airplane Wings investigates numerically and experimentally fundamental
problems of very high capacity aircraft having large elastic wings. This issue summarizes
the findings of the 12-year research program at RWTH Aachen University which
was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) from 1997 through
2008. The research program covered the following three main topics of large transport
aircraft: (i) Model flow, wakes, and vortices of airplanes in high-lift-configuration,
(ii) Numerical tools for large scale adaptive flow simulation based on multiscale
analysis and a parametric mapping concept for grid generation, and (iii) Validated
computational design tools based on direct aeroelastic simulation with reduced
structural models.