CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks

separation from a trainer jet

Aleksander Olejnik
Faculty of Mechatronics and Aerospace, Military University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland
Adam Dziubi

nski
Department of Aerodynamics, Łukasiewicz Research Network – Institute of Aviation, Warsaw, Poland, and
Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Faculty of Mechatronics and Aerospace, Military University of Technology, Warsaw, Poland

Abstract
Purpose – This study aims to create 6-degree of freedom (SDOF) for computational fluid dynamics (CFD) simulations of body movement, and to
validate using the experimental data for empty tank separation from I-22 Iryda jet trainer. The procedure has an ability to be modified or extended,
to simulate, for example, a sequential release from the joints.
Design/methodology/approach – A set of CFD simulations are calculated. Both the SDOF procedure and the CFD simulation settings are validated
using the wind tunnel data available for the aircraft.
Findings – The simulation using designed procedure gives predictable results, but offers availability to be modified to represent external forces, i.e.
from body interaction or control system without necessity to model the control surfaces.
Practical implications – The procedure could be used to model the separation of external stores and design the deployment of anti-radar chaff,
flares or ejection seats.
Originality/value – The work presents original work, caused by insufficient abilities of original SDOF procedure in ANSYS code. Additional value is
the ability of the procedure to be easily modified.
Keywords Computational fluid dynamics, Motion simulation, Aerodynamics, Store separation
Paper type Research paper

Introduction are sufficient to obtain valuable data about separation safety,

The modern methods of computational fluid dynamics (CFD),
involving remeshing techniques, have been made available to
simulate the motion of external stores being dropped from
aircraft (Murman et al., 2003). Moreover, the interaction
between the store and its carrier (Chlebny et al., 1985;
Winczura, 1994; Lasek, 2002; Purdon et al., 2009; Osman et al.,
2016; Jamison, 2018), which was so far difficult to be
introduced, is calculated directly by means of these methods, as
a part of simulated fluid flow phenomena. The simplified
methods as in Lasek and Sibilski (2002) are still used but only in
preliminary design or in case of Monte–Carlo method analyses.
When the safety of store drop process is an issue, the
factors such as aerodynamic interactions are not negligible,
because the forces occurring because of those interactions
are unpredictable, and often lead to collision of a store with
the aircraft, other stores and sometimes another aircraft in
the formation. Because no store is dropped with working
control system (Sadeh and Gaton, 2003; Carter and Lind,
2012a, 2012b) for safety reasons, models using remeshing
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but still, it is necessary to validate the results with either wind
tunnel (Kern and Bruner, 1996) or flight data (Snyder and
Roberts, 2006). Parametric models as in Carter and Lind
(2012) are developed, but the CFD appears to be one of the
valuable sources for those models.
The object of the study, the I-22 Iryda twin-engine jet, is an
example of design, for which political factors are more
important than those of a technology nature. This project,
abandoned after manufacturing a batch of 17 aircraft powered
by in-house designed new jet engines, has left a lot of research
_
data (Zurek et al., 1991; Krzysiak, 1996; Rogulski, 1997;
Gnarowski, 2014), which still can be used to validate current
attempts in problem solving. So the authors, to test and validate
the newly created procedure, took the results of drop tests from
Krzysiak (1996), and tried to replicate them by means of the
CFD simulation. The next step was to use the 1:1 scale of
simulation using the real airplane, so that the results, compared
carefully with another known method, could give an
information about transition from 1:4 scale aircrafts wind
tunnel results to the real-life scale object.
The present work is also based on PhD thesis (Dziubi
nski,
2017) aimed at creating a 6-degree of freedom or (SDOF)
simulation of motion procedure, where, unlike the standard
SDOF function available in the ANSYS code, the equations of

Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology Received 12 December 2019

© Emerald Publishing Limited [ISSN 1748-8842] Revised 16 June 2020
[DOI 10.1108/AEAT-12-2019-0247] Accepted 29 June 2020
 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

motion are adjustable to include user-defined modifications.
The procedure uses the commercial ANSYS CFD software,
and its capability to introduce a user’s computational code.
No one tests and validates his new SDOF procedure with
completely new, unvalidated data. By analyzing the non-
stationary flow field, it can be checked how a free-falling object
(bomb, fuel tank) will behave under the influence of
aerodynamic interference with the aircraft. The possibility of
simulating unsteady flow because of the use of the finite volume
method, as in Wang et al. (2017) and Li and Ye (2019), seems
to be crucial in understanding the phenomena occurring during
the separation, and which may lead to the hazardous situation
in the air. The article proves that the results of CFD calculation
are in a good agreement with wind tunnel tests (WTTs).
Computational fluid dynamics model
development and numerical analysis
The geometry of the aircraft has been reconstructed in the two
stages of accuracy. The fuselage with the engine nacelles, and
_
the vertical tail, has been reconstructed from Zurek et al. (1991)
using the Wings 3D software, which is useful for the manual
transition from 2D views to the 3D world (Figure 1a).
Moreover, this tool is capable of smoothing the model, keeping
its topology intact, and as a result, the aerodynamic properties
of the shape obtained by means of it are better than those
obtained by means of other methods of shape smoothing. The
decision to give up the CAD drawing of fuselage, using
NURBS and patches, resulted from the need to simplify the
process. This approach was not used for the wings and the
horizontal stabilizer, because those shapes are important to
obtain valuable characteristics; therefore, the exact airfoils
(Selig, 2015) of the aircraft were used to replicate the wing
and horizontal stabilizer from its original technical drawings,
with the proper chord and the wing skewness distribution
[Figure 1(b) and 1(c)].
This model has been also validated using the WTT results of
aerodynamic characteristics, obtained in the low-speed wind
Figure 1 (a) Simple model of the fuselage in Wings 3D; (b) exact CAD model of the real wing; (c) final, mixed model of whole aircraft
Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
tunnel at the Institute of Aviation. The comparison results will be
shown further in the part of this article presenting the results.
Knowing that the model represents truly the test object results,
the effort was focused on reconstruction of the pylons and the
tank itself, also in terms of finding the tank’s inertia properties.
The data from Krzysiak (1996) and Gnarowski (2014) were
extended by the measurement and photos of the real object. The
final model is shown in Figure 2.
A hybrid computational mesh, consisting of the tetrahedral
elements with the prismatic ones only in a boundary layer, has
been created around the model, using the ICEM CFD tool
within the ANSYS CFD commercial package (Figure 3). The
boundary layer mesh parameters have been set so that they fulfill
the Y1 parameters between 30 and 200, which is one of the
suggested ranges to use, when the Spalart–Allmaras turbulence
model is applied (ANSYS Guide book, 2013).
Two coordinate systems are used in this simulation. One,
local, Oxoyozo (Figure 4a) is oriented with the aircraft datum
planes and placed in the front structural frame’s symmetry
plane. In the Oxyz coordinate system, the aerodynamic one, its
x-axis is oriented with the flow direction, whereas the z-axis
belongs to the aircraft’s symmetry plane. The reference wing
surface [Figure 4(b)] is extended with the theoretical surface
submerged in the fuselage.
An SDOF procedure has been developed for a store separation
simulation. The procedure allowed for simulation of the store-
free movement under effects of aerodynamic forces, gravity and
taking into account the inertia effects. Because the original
one contained in the ANSYS CFD package features some
deficiencies, it was impossible to develop a store drop procedure
with time-separated hardpoint disconnection, allowing the
store to spin. This feature has not been used in this simulation,
because it was carried out only to test the validity of the
movement model, but this issue was a main reason to conduct
the work.
The in-house SDOF procedure uses another local
coordinate system OBxByBzB connected to the store and
moving with it. On the illustration (Figure 5), a fighter jet and a
 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

Figure 2 CAD models of (a) the pylon; (b) the tank with horizontal fins and (c) the final model of whole aircraft

Figure 3 Computational mesh around the aircraft and details of the mesh density on the tanks

guided bomb are shown, because this was the main dissertation
topic, but the same settings and nomenclature are used in the
empty tank drop calculations.
The main purpose of the procedure is to calculate a new
position and orientation of a free-falling store in each time
step of the simulation. The flow field calculation is a time-
dependent problem, so it is hard to use any of the higher
order schemes of the integration of the equations of motion;
therefore, to avoid any prediction of the flow (or predictor–
corrector methods; Deslandes, 1996), the Euler scheme is
 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

Figure 4 (a) Coordinate systems and (b) reference surfaces and lengths used in the simulations

applied. The CFD method demands such a small time-step

Figure 5 Local coordinate system of external store size that the approximation error is minimized.
Referring to the previously mentioned equations of motion,
assuming that the origin is in the center of gravity, they are
adopted in the following form (Duke et al., 1988):
The translational motion equation:
@ !
1 !
! !
V ¼ F v V (1)
@t m
where:
!
V = is the linear velocity vector;
!
F = is the external forces vector;
!v = is the rotational velocity vector; and
m = is the mass of the tank.
The rotational motion equation:
 
@ !
ð v Þ ¼ hIi1 ƒ!
M !
v  hIi!
v (2)
@t

where:
hIi = is the tensor of the tank inertia; and
ƒ!
M = is the external moment vector.
Both the above equations are used to calculate the vectors of
angular and linear acceleration caused by the external forces
and moments, resulting mainly from aerodynamic forces, and

Figure 6 Comparison of the calculated drag force coefficients with the Figure 7 Comparison of the calculated lift force coefficients with the
wind tunnel tests (WTT) data wind tunnel tests (WTT) data
 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

Figure 8 Comparison of the calculated pitching moment coefficients
with the wind tunnel tests (WTT) data
Figure 9 Comparison of the calculated pitching moment without
horizontal tail coefficients with the wind tunnel tests (WTT) data
Figure 10 Three levels of the model complexity: the clean model, the model with strakes and the model with tanks and pylons
Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
internal forces arising from inertia and constraints, which are
the unique features of the object being analyzed. Then, the
vectors of linear and rotational velocities are integrated from
the accelerations and velocities at the previous time step and
those values are fed to the mesh motion procedure within the
CFD software.
Results
The results are divided into three sets. First, the aerodynamic
characteristics are compared with the wind tunnel ones; next,
interactions between the pylons and tanks are shown; and
finally, the external tank drop test with a comparison of two
SDOF models is presented.
A comparison of the calculated aerodynamic characteristics
with those obtained in WTT presents a challenge because the
drop tests were conducted on an aircraft model without
the strakes. The results for the complete aircraft available to the
author (Rogulski, 1997), were obtained for the M-96 version
which is already equipped with the strakes. Therefore, both
configurations were calculated with the assumption that the
difference caused by the strakes in the drop tests results
(Krzysiak, 1996) will be adequate.
Figure 11 Effects of external stores on drag coefficient
 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

Figure 12 Effects of external stores on lift coefficient
Figure 13 Effects of external stores on pitching moment coefficient
Figure 15 (a) Test case choice (Krzysiak, 1996) and (b) the experimental rig in the high-speed wind tunnel (Krzysiak, 2010)
Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
Figure 14 Effects of external stores on lift-to-drag ratio
The results of comparison of the drag coefficient (Figure 6)
show a high accuracy of the CFD prediction at low angles of
attack, and in the beginning of the separation process, the over-
prediction of the drag increases for the CFD results. The WTT
model was made in the 1:4 scale; therefore, the difference may
be caused by the Reynolds number. The strakes induce a
constant increase of drag over the whole calculated range. The
lift force coefficient (Figure 7) accuracy is almost perfect in the
a = [5°,5°] range. Above this range, a decrease appears, but
the WTT characteristics soon become parallel to the calculated
one. Probably, there is some area of separation on the fuselage,
which the CFD fails to represent. The stall is milder in WTT
than in the CFD simulation, and this is again probably because
of the Reynolds number difference.
In analyses of the pitching moment coefficient (Figures 8
and 9), two phenomena are clearly visible. The first is the
strake effect visible between both CFD characteristics. As
one could suppose, the strakes destabilize the aircraft,
flattening the moment curve around the point of a = 2°, just
like any lifting surface located in front of the center of gravity
 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

should do. The other thing is that the experimental moment
characteristics are almost an exact copy of the baseline one
(the WTT model does have the strake), but translated into
the “nose-up” tendency. So there is some source of a constant
moment and there is a different inclination of the tail surfaces
than that described in the results. Even more interestingly, a
comparison between the moment coefficient without tail
surface shows that there is an almost exact angle of the linear
part between both configurations with the strakes, but they
are slightly offset. So, there is some source of the constant
moment, but the angle of the tail surface is the main reason of
the second difference, occurring between the CFD and
WTT.
In Figure 10(a), a short comparison between the three
analyzed configurations at the same angle of attack is shown.
The illustration shows the static pressure distribution and
pathlines visualization of flow on the left side of the fuselage,
Figure 16 Comparison between the standard SDOF procedure (magenta) and the rewritten one (yellow)
Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
wing and both tail surfaces. There is a visible difference caused
by the vortex created by the strake, and almost the same flow
above the wing for both the baseline configuration and the one
with stores. Thus, the stores do not interfere with the flow
above the wing.
The external stores effects on the aerodynamic characteristics
are shown in Figures 11–14. The stores reduce the lift by a
constant amount and increase the drag at low angles of attack
(Figure 11). What is interesting, the effect of the stores above a =
14° (close to stall) is negligible; therefore, at low velocities, the
stores do not cause an additional drag, which is good from the
safety point of view. The stores slightly reduce the pitch stability
(Figure 12). Again, this is the effect of a surface located before the
center of gravity. Also, the stores slightly reduce the moment
coefficient into the nose-down direction (a constant source of
moment, the parasite drag). The stores reduce the lift-to-drag
ratio value by around 1.2, from 9.5 to 8.3 (Figure 14).
 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

Figure 17 Pressure distribution map during the separation
Knowing that the CFD characteristics are reasonable, the authors
began testing the store drop procedures, comparing the original
one with the recreated procedure. A specific case has been chosen
for the tests. In an experiment one of the cases resulted in a “near
miss” – the tank almost hit the fuselage of the aircraft. Because this
is quite a unique case, it is worth to be recalculated using the CFD
means. Should there be a hit or a completely different movement,
the procedure still has an error; otherwise, either there is no error,
or the existing errors cancel each other. The specific case has been
shown at the Ma vs angle of attack chart in Figure 15.The test rig
configuration from Krzysiak (1996) using the half-size model, the
tank and a fish net to catch it, was fixed to the side wall of a
Figure 18 Two cases most similar to the analyzed one, simulated in Krzysiak (1996) – empty tank flight paths
Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
transonic wind tunnel. A comparison between the results for the
original tests and the rewritten SDOF procedures is presented
below, and there is slight difference in the x position and in the
sideslip orientation, but in this case, they are negligible because
the results already show the patterns of tank movement after the
separation (Figure 16).
The results of simulation of tank separation are shown in
Figure 17 in the form of the static pressure maps and a set of
recorded phases of the tank motion. The effects of the fuselage
are clearly visible and they make the nose of the tank to move
outwards, posing a threat to the aircraft’s engine bay as it may
be hit by the tank’s tail.
 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

Unfortunately, no photo documentation has been secured in
the work (Krzysiak, 1996). Thus, the most similar store drop
cases in terms of boundary conditions, described in this paper,
are shown in Figure 18. For both of them, the tank behavior
with the characteristic sideway nose movement tendency is
similar to the CFD results. The main difference is the tank
position at the beginning of simulation. This shows how
sometimes a slight change of the parameters could cause an
unexpected result, and hence the capability to recreate the
process by means of CFD becomes a necessity.
Conclusion
The paper presents a comparison of available data concerning
the I-22 Iryda jet trainer with results obtained by means of the
CFD methods. Also, an empty tank drop has been analyzed,
using both the standard and the user-defined SDOF
procedure. Because there was no match between the WTT
configuration for aerodynamic characteristics and the WTT for
the tank separation, a set of adequate models having specified
features (mainly the strakes) has been tested to define the
differences. On the basis of this results, a way of modeling – or
reverse engineering – the aircraft geometry, when exact
geometry of the lifting and control surfaces is reconstructed
with great accuracy and for the remaining parts as fuselage and
engine nacelles only the hobby model documentation is used,
proven to be of good coincidence with WTT results. The
underwing tanks have no significant influence on the airframe
aerodynamics except the efficiency (lift-to-drag coefficient),
but it is a parameter where small differences are usually
exaggerated. The result has proven the relevance of the
obtained characteristics and the assumed boundary conditions.
However, when the exact data are expected to be in the source,
they are missing, so the conclusions have to be withdrawn with
most similar cases, here for the pylon placed forward and
backward from the final position on the airframe. Nonetheless,
the tank in the simulation is behaving with a very good
similarity to those cases from literature: the drop test
simulation, similarly to the chosen WTT test case, is also in a
borderline between a safe drop and a crash with the aircraft,
proving adequacy of the method. It was a necessary information
because, later, the procedure was used to simulate the empty
tank drop with sequential release from the constraints, and
hence the authors had to be sure that the whole mathematic
model and code works properly, even during the large rotations
of the simulated object. The idea of sequential testing and
creating a code from simple to complicated, when all the big
errors could be found at early stage of work, is once again
proven to be a better solution than to write down in the code all
possible equations and wondering where is a mistake and how
to find it. Assumptions and definitions for such simulation have
been described in the paper, in hope to use them as the
guidance for future simulations of similar kind.
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Aircraft Engineering and Aerospace Technology
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(2016), “Numerical analysis of an external store separation
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 CFD simulation of empty fuel tanks separation
nski and Łukasz Kiszkowiak
Aleksander Olejnik, Adam Dziubi

Selig, M. (2015), “UIUC airfoil coordinates database”, available
at: https://m-selig.ae.illinois.edu/ads/coord_database.html
(accessed 13.11.2015).
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analysis and testing to multiple-carriage weapon
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_
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Further reading
ANSYS Inc (2013), “ANSYS fluent theory guide”, Release
15.0, Canonsburg, PA.
Lasek, M. and Sibilski, K. (2002), “Modelling of external store
separation”, 40th American Institute of Aeronautics &
Astronautics Sciences Meeting & Exhibit.
Corresponding author
Łukasz Kiszkowiak can be contacted at: lukasz.kiszkowiak@
wat.edu.pl