The proposed Phase I effort is highly relevant to several on-going and future NASA projects in NASA's fixed wing project under Fundamental Aeronautics Program. Initiatives such as the elastic aircraft flight control and Truss-Braced Wing (TBW) development will benefit from the research conducted in the proposed Phase I effort. NASA is currently studying the application of the VCCTEF to a generic transport model (GTM) and plans to perform a wind tunnel test for measuring the drag characteristics of this VCCTEF-GTM configuration in FY2014-2015. The FUN3D nonlinear trim module can be adopted by NASA to calculate the optimum SMA actuations for minimum drag prediction to provide a guideline for establishing a viable wind tunnel test plan.
The FUN3D nonlinear trim module can provide accurate prediction of optimum flap scheduling and can be applied to many categories of flight vehicles including blended wing-bodies, joined-wings, sub/supersonic transports, morphing aircraft, space planes, reusable launch vehicles, and similar revolutionary concepts being pursued. Hence, the proposed research and its outcomes will be highly needed for designing the next generation of civil as well as military aircraft to meet the stringent future performance goals.
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