Development of new preliminary design methodologies for regional turboprop aircraft by CFD analyses

Since 2011 the aerodynamic research group of the Dept. of Industrial Engineering of the University of Naples "Federico II" makes use of the University's computing grid infrastructure SCoPE to perform parallel computing simulations with the commercial CAE package Star-CCM+. This infrastructure allows Navier-Stokes calculations on complete aircraft configurations in a relative short amount of time. Therefore, the software and the above mentioned infrastructure allow the parametric analysis of several configurations that are extremely useful to the correct estimation of aerodynamic interference among aircraft components and to highlight some useful trends that could indicate how a specific aerodynamic characteristic (i.e. the drag of a component, the wing downwash or the directional stability contribution of the vertical tail) is linked to aircraft geometrical parameters. Thus, with the choice of a specific set of test-cases it is possible to make a deep investigation on some aerodynamic features and, from the analyses of results, it is possible to extract and develop ad-hoc semi-empirical methodologies that could be used in preliminary design activities. In this paper, two investigations are presented: the aerodynamic interference among aircraft components in sideslip and the aerodynamic characteristics of a fuselage, focusing on typical large turbopropeller aircraft category.