n72.75
Move slow and try not to break too much.
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So I got bored and started playing around with lifting body shapes and the trial version of MicroCFD. It produced some interesting results. As you can see, I am able to get force and moment calculations out of this software (which is not free, but the way, but is affordable bo mere mortals, unlike ANSYS or the like) however, running on my 8 year old Q6600 took over 9 hours to solve.
If you wanted to build a lookup table with a resolution of:
α 5° increments up to 90°
β 5° increments up to 90°
δe in 5° increments from -40° to 40°
δa in 5° increments from 0° to 40°
δr in 5° increments from 0° to 30°
α -- 18 points
β -- 18 points
δe -- 16 data points
δa -- 8 data points
δr -- 8 data points
With my setup, you'd be looking at roughly 340 years of computation time. There are of course a number of ways to shorten that. My GPU only has 1.2 GB of ram. If it had 6GB or so, I'd be able to run this simulation of the GPU, shortening the simulation time by an order of magnitude or so.
http://microcfd.com/runtime.htm
If you were smart about what you treated as a superposition, particularly control surface deflections, you could probably get your comput times down to a year or two.
Then you'd be able produce a lookup table, assuming you trust the mesh and solver to be accurate.
With adaptive meshing and GPU computing you could probably cut two orders of magnitude off of the compute time. Then you're only 10000 times too slow to do this in real time. But Moore's law says we're only 20 years away from being able to do that...
Enjoy the pictures:
I'm calling the space plane the Moth
I might develop it into something, but no promises.
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