Research on the Performance of Slender Aircraft with Flare-Stabilized-Skirt

In this paper, a morphing aircraft with a deployable flared skirt is proposed, and the influence of the flare skirt on the static stability of hypersonic aircraft is studied. The theoretical model of static stability of slender aircraft is established, and the position of the center of pressure can be used as a theoretical basis to measure static stability. Three-dimensional compressible Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) solver and an SST k-ω turbulence model are used to analyze the aerodynamic characteristics of the aircraft and the influence effect of the flared skirt on the pressure distribution of the body, and the influence trend on the position of the pressure center is verified. At the same time, the reliability of the code and grid is verified by a classic example, and the results are in good agreement with the experimental data in the current literature. Finally, the static stability of an aircraft with flared skirts with different deployment angles is quantitatively measured by defining the stability derivative at the common point. The results show that the static stability of the aircraft with the same forebody is improved by more than 100% under different flight Mach numbers when the flared skirt deployment angle is 30° compared to 0°.