Comparative Analysis of Aerodynamic Characteristics of F16 and F22 Combat Aircraft using Computational Fluid Dynamics

This paper presents the computational investigation of air flow over an aircraft at realistic speeds while demonstrating the importance of extending the existing analysis to the complete airplane and how pivotal it is in improving its in-flight performance. The study is done for F16 and F22 aircraft using ANSYS Fluent (19.2) to obtain pressure distribution, shear stress distribution and temperature variation on the complete surface of the aircraft. Since the front section of the aircraft is prone to direct initial impact of surrounding environment, this portion is also examined. Here, as the speed is doubled from Mach 1 to Mach 2, a rise in the value of all the three variables is noticed for the F16 aircraft, whereas the pressure distribution for F22 aircraft shows strange behaviour for the highest speed (Mach 2). On comparing the results over the whole surface, it is seen that F16 experiences smaller pressure (29% lower for Mach 1 and 30% for Mach 2), temperature (9.5% lower for Mach 1 and 30% for Mach 2) and shear stress relative to F22 and the stress shows a huge change (90% lower for Mach 1 and 83% for Mach 2). Results of the present study imply that the design of the aircraft highly influences its performance as the parameters discussed touch their limits.