Wind Tunnel Study of a Large Aerostat, CFD Validation

To further the development of larger and more capable aerostats at TCOM, an update to the aerodynamic database was needed. This led to comprehensive wind tunnel testing conducted in the Glenn L. Martin (GLM) Wind Tunnel at the University of Maryland in 2010. The setup and results of this wind tunnel test were documented in Ref. 1. As part of the continuous validation process, the results of the GLM 2010 wind tunnel test were used to validate the Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) method used at TCOM. The validation includes matching the force and moment coefficients and the pressure distributions from the GLM 2010 test.