F-35 Conventional Mode Jet-Effects Testing Methodology

摘要

The F-35 Joint Strike Fighter Program team conducted a wind tunnel and Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) program to quantify the conventional flight mode afterbody jet-effects characteristics of all three aircraft variants. The program featured four test entries with a 10%-scale model with a fully metric shell, nonmetric thrust, and a flow-through force balance. The interference effects for the final model design were defined with CFD and bookkept along with the wind-tunnel based jet-effects data in the powered aerodynamic database. The data from this program sufficiently described the jet-effects impact for all three variants across the full aircraft/engine operational envelope, and was subsequently incorporated into highly detailed 3 and 6 degree of freedom models of the F-35.