Aerospace and Defense
The Aerospace and defense industries are one of the oldest industries to be using CFD as a tool. CFD is used here to cut costs and to improve the accuracy of the product designed. CFD is used to predict the drag, lift, noise, structural and thermal loads, combustion., etc., performance in aircraft systems and subsystems. By using massively parallel supercomputers, CFD is frequently used to study how fluids behave in complex scenarios, such as boundary layer transition, turbulence, and sound generation, with applications throughout and beyond aerospace and defense engineering.
Berger bullet
The firing tests were performed by Bryan Litz who is a ballistician at Berger Bullets, an Aerospace Engineer, and an accomplished U.S. rifle team shooter and coach. Accurate drag coefficient data improves the shooter's accuracy of hitting smaller targets at longer ranges. The drag coefficient is an indicator of the amount of aerodynamic resistance that a bullet faces while in the projectile. A small miscalculation in the drag coefficient may lead the bullet off-target, especially in windy conditions. Still, most bullet manufacturers use simple, and often inaccurate, computer programs to estimate drag coefficients. In this article, I propose CFD (Computational Fluid Dynamics) modeling as a way to accurately estimate drag coefficients, and, as a complement to the firing tests for a better understanding of bullet ballistics. I will compare the CFD results with field firing test data on drag coefficients for a Berger bullet.
Drones (Fixed wing/ rotating wing)
Today drones have immensely developed from the concepts of aerodynamics, payload mechanics, and computer science to help people worldwide. Applications of drones are focused on defense technology, delivery systems, scenic photography and videography, and agriculture. Fluid dynamics plays an important role to decide the forces acting on the body of a drone. The shape, size, and speed of the propeller and drone depending on the aerodynamics of propellers or blades. Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) modeling helps for flow dynamics of airflow over drones.
Drosophila wing flapping
Attention is focused on flapping wing-based UAV designs because of the potential for increased lift capability, aerodynamic performance, gust tolerance, and maneuverability exhibited by biological flapping-wing flyers, which operate in the same aerodynamic regime of fixed and rotating wing. Using CFD all the above mentioned aspects can be computed and accurate results can be obtained.