Finding Pressure Center of a Projectile CFD Simulation, ANSYS Fluent

Description

Description

A projectile refers to a body that is thrown into the air and follows a path towards the target area without any propulsion. It may have lift surfaces to increase its range or to provide guidance.

The center of pressure is a point where all aerodynamic forces acting on the body can be assumed to act to this point, without creating any moment. Therefore, by determining the center of pressure and the lift force, we can simplify the trajectory analysis of a projectile to a point mass dynamics problem.

In this project, a projectile equipped with aerodynamic surfaces was simulated at a velocity of 130 m/s and an angle of attack of 5 degrees. The lift force was calculated, and the center of pressure under these conditions was found.

The geometry was designed in SpaceClaim® and meshed using ANSYS Meshing®. The mesh around the projectile body is unstructured, while it is structured in most of the remaining domain. The total element count is 2,871,393.

Methodology

In this simulation, the turbulence effect is modeled with the k-ε standard model.

Results

Contours of velocity and pressure around the projectile are presented; additionally, pathlines are tracked. The lift of the projectile is 109.55 N, and the location of the center of pressure is:

CP = (-0.0008655, -0.0423106, 0).