Aircraft Design — Amphibious Aircraft

This work involved performing multiphase computational fluid dynamics (CFD) analyses of supercavitating hydrofoils and hulls to compute their hydrodynamic coefficients.

Multiphase computational fluid dynamics simulation of an amphibious aircraft hull

The CFD sweeps were performed over speed and angle of attack to produce surrogate models for the hydrodynamic coefficients of a supercavitating hydrofoil, capturing the water volume fraction around the wetted section.

Water volume fraction around a super-cavitating hydrofoil section

Surrogate contours of hydrofoil force and moment coefficients

These surrogates were used in a water-takeoff analysis that coupled the hydrofoil, hull, and aircraft aerodynamic loads, over which the hydrofoil incidence and span were optimized to minimise takeoff distance.

Incidence angle and span design space for takeoff distance

Takeoff analysis: baseline vs. optimised configuration

Publications

Arjit Seth and Rhea Liem. “Hydrofoil Conceptual Design and Optimization Framework for Amphibious Aircraft”. AIAA AVIATION 2019 Forum, Dallas, Texas, USA, 2019, p. 3552. doi:10.2514/6.2019-3552
James M. Shihua, Arjit Seth, Ye Li, and Rhea P. Liem. “Experimental and Computational Analyses of Take-off Hydrodynamics of an Amphibian Aircraft Hull”. AIAA AVIATION 2020 Forum, 2020, p. 3174. doi:10.2514/6.2020-3174
Arjit Seth and Rhea P. Liem. “Amphibious Aircraft Developments: Computational Studies of Hydrofoil Design for Improvements in Water-Takeoffs”. Aerospace 8.1 (2021), p. 10. doi:10.3390/aerospace8010010

This work formed the basis of my MPhil thesis, Development of a Computational Design Framework for Amphibious Aircraft.