Evaluation of nacelle drag using Computational Fluid Dynamics

Thrust and drag components must be defined and properly accounted in order to estimate aircraft performance, and this hard task is particularty essential for propulsion system where drag components are functions of engine operating conditions. The present work describes a numerical method used to calculate the drag in different nacelles, long and short ducted. Two- and three-dimensional calculations were performed, solving the Reynolds Averaged Navier-Stokes (RANS) equations with a commercial Computational Fluid Dynamics (CFD) code. It is then possible to obtain four drag components: wave, induced, viscous and spurious drag using a far-field formulation. An expression in terms of entropy variations was shown and drag for different nacelle geometries was estimated

Complete quantum-inspired framework for computational fluid dynamics

Computational fluid dynamics is both an active research field and a key tool for industrial applications. The central challenge is to simulate turbulent flows in complex geometries, a compute-power intensive task due to the large vector dimensions required by discretized meshes. Here, we propose a full-stack solver for incompressible fluids with memory and runtime scaling polylogarithmically in the mesh size. Our framework is based on matrix-product states, a powerful compressed representation of quantum states. It is complete in that it solves for flows around immersed objects of diverse geometries, with non-trivial boundary conditions, and can retrieve the solution directly from the compressed encoding, i.e. without ever passing through the expensive dense-vector representation. These developments provide a toolbox with potential for radically more efficient simulations of real-life fluid problems