Numerical Simulation of Aircraft Tire-Generated Spray and Engine Ingestion on Flooded Runways

The aircraft water spray test on water-contaminated runways is of great significance in the civil aircraft airworthiness certification. It is a very complex strongly nonlinear multiphysics process involving tire-generated water spray and engine ingestion. In this paper, an integrated simulation platform that combines the smoothed particle hydrodynamics method and the discrete phase model in a finite volume framework is developed to predict the complex physical interactions and processes. The smoothed particle hydrodynamics method is used to accurately predict the tire-generated water spray pattern, and the discrete phase model method is used to predict the droplets motion in the airflow field around the airplane. The initial conditions of the droplets in the discrete phase model method are provided by the smoothed particle hydrodynamics computations. The results of the numerical simulations are validated using NASA’s tire-generated water spray experiments and the water spray and engine ingestion tests on a regional jet with rear-mounted engines.