| Advisor(s) | Alberto Guardone, Giuseppe Quaranta, Dario Isola |
| Expected duration | 6 months (one student) |
| Description | Small scale technologies are considered of primary importance in military field for both scouting and intelligence. An incredible amount of energies and money is spent every year to continuously push forward the research on tiny aerial vehicles. As it is pointed out by the MAST-CTA project granted by the U.S. Army, which the Politecnico di Milano is part of, the research in the field of very small drones is still in its early/exploratory age and in many cases the basic physics underlying each application is yet to be understood. Within this context computational fluid dynamics (CFD) plays a major role due to its flexiblity and efficiency. While for standard aircraft configurations, such as fixed wings, CFD has reached very high levels of fidelity to be excepted as a standard tool for design, for non- canonical applications, such as flapping wings, the push for research in the development of configuration-specific solutions is still strong. In the case of flapping wings many additional difficulties are featured: the unsteadiness of the flow-field, the very strong fluid-structure coupling, the presence of large vortical regions in the field and the low values of the Mach and Reynolds numbers. The on going research on the development of efficient and accurate schemes continuously sets higher standards, and very promising results have been shown by Flowmesh, the most recent solver developed at DIA. Flowmesh is a finite-volumes solver for the arbitrary Lagrangian-Eulerian (ALE) formulation of the Euler equations that implements a unique strategy that allows to perform adaptive computations without resorting to interpolation. The student is expected to become active member of the Flowmesh developers team and a strong interaction with the rest of the group is mandatory. A significant contribution in terms of the development numerical schemes and coding is expected. |
| Required tasks | Definition and implementation of a preconditioner for low Mach numbers. Assestment of the convergence capabilities of the preconditioned solver over steady cases. Development and convergence analysis of a specific low Mach number preconditioner for ALE applications. Evaluation of the dynamic response of a small-scale flapping airfoil with deforming grids. Indentification of the key parameters for adaptive grids computation. |
| Tools and languages | Flowmesh, Fortran, Matlab |
| Prerequisites | FEM/FV methods (very good), CFD (good), Fortran (very good) |
| Outcome | The student is expected to present the work at an international conference and to be co-author of a publications on a reviewed accademic journal |
| Contacts | Please send an email to Alberto Guardone or Dario Isola, see contacts page. |