Aerodynamic Data Set Generation for the Experimental Vehicle ReFEx

Aerodynamic characterization of vehicles is mandatory to identify their flight envelope, their controllability behavior and ultimately their shape. During the design process one goal is to efficiently determine the aerodynamic properties for every possible state during the flight. Therefore, the aerodynamic force and moment coefficients need to be known for all combinations that are expected to occur of velocity, orientation, altitude, control surface deflections and dynamic values such as rotation rates. The amount of conditions that need to be evaluated can be reduced if an independence within these variation parameters is proven. For an aerodynamic design process via CFD this paper purposes an additional method to reduce the amount of data points. Through the use of the DLR TAU code with an overlapping meshes feature, envelope datasets can be produced for the momentum free trimmed state in each flight point. With this starting set, several subsets with parameter variations can be computed. This reduces the amount of simulations needed by 65% for the investigated case, the flight experiment ReFEx.