Analysis of the Stability and Control Characteristics of the F/A-18E Super Hornet using the Kestrel CFD Flow Solver

The goal of this project is to evaluate the ability of the Kestrel flow solver to analyze the stability and control characteristics of the F/A-18E Super Hornet. The Kestrel flow solver is currently in development and real applications are being used to assess the accuracy of the code and find areas where improvements must be made. The F/A-18E is one of the most challenging Navy aircraft to model and significant amounts of data are available to assess the accuracy of the results. For this study, a variety of configurations and flow conditions were analyzed. Specifically, Kestrel was used to analyze: the longitudinal stability and control characteristics at low-speed and high angle of attack for configurations with full and neutral nose-down control; the longitudinal and lateral/directional stability and control characteristics at transonic speeds; transonic roll damping; the longitudinal stability and control characteristics at Mach 0.6 at 30,000 ft; and the stability and control characteristics of the aircraft doing a constant-g wind-up turn maneuver. To assess the accuracy of the calculations, most of the results were compared to wind-tunnel data, data from a flight database, or known trends of the data. In most cases, the correlation between Kestrel and the truth data is extremely good.

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