CFD Analysis Of Engine Air Intake For A Pusher Type Light Transport Aircraft

摘要

In the process of design, development and certification of a turbo-prop Light Transport Aircraft (LTA), an important aspect is to establish the installed performance of the engine before carrying out actual flight tests. In this context, it is relevant to study and analyse behaviour of the engine air intake performance before commencing actual flight tests. CFD analysis of flow in and around the nacelle and engine air intake duct was carried out using two RANS based models, S-A and SST k-omega using the commercial software ANSYS Fluent. Special emphasis was laid on developing a good quality mesh for the computational domain with a finer boundary layer mesh along the wall and by maintaining a higher density mesh at critical areas. Ram air recovery and mass flow rate of main air intake duct has been established from the results obtained. The results obtained from the CFD study have shown that the inlet system pressure loss and ram air recovery are within limits prescribed by the engine original equipment manufacturer. From the overall analysis, total pressure total pressure recovery at the plenum was found satisfactory for all flight cases, covering variation in the Mach number, altitude and nacelle AOA. Qualitative results obtained from CFD show that the behaviour of the engine intake is consistent across flight conditions.