Design and test of a practical aircraft model for wind tunnel testing with adjustable control surfaces based on 3D printing

As keys for wind tunnel testing, design and fabrication of aircraft model are critical to the development cycle and cost of aircraft. To improve the efficiency of aircraft development, a practical method based on 3D printing technology to design and fabricate model is proposed in the paper. A full low-speed model of one real aircraft is designed and evaluated. The modelis in a plastic-metal hybrid structure, with the 3D printing-made plastic parts as its aerodynamic contour outside and machined metal parts as its backbone inside. V-shaped brackets and shaft-pin mechanisms are adopted to adjust deflection angles of control surfaces. As an attempt to eliminate the precision loss of plastic parts due to abrasion during assembly, metal bushes are custom-designed and inset into the plastic holes. Passing the strength/stiffness calibration based on computational fluid dynamic-computational structure dynamic (CFD/CSD) calculation, the assembled model is tested in the FD-09 low-speed wind tunnel. The hybrid model can be used safely in the testing condition when the angle of attack is 8° and the wind speed is 70 m/s. The aerodynamic data from the hybrid model is in consistent well with those from the metal one, which indicates the practicability of the new method to design and fabricate aircraft models. Compared with the metal model, the time and cost concerning design and fabrication of the hybrid model is reduced remarkably, and it can meet the demand of aircraft engineers for the fast and low-cost models and could be promising to improve the development efficiency of aircraft.