flow5 v7.24 release information

The pressure forces acting on the fuselage are sensitive to a couple of numerical issues which can cause them to be inaccurate or even unreliable.
This occurs typically:

• in the case of thin surface calculations as the wing and fuselage meshes are not connected,
• in the case of thick surface calculations where the fuselage connects to the wings: locally the pressure and velocity gradients can be unrealistic because viscosity is not included in the analysis.

To accomodate this, flow5 includes an option to explicitely exclude the fuselage pressure forces in the evaluation of forces and moments.

The exclusion is limited to the final stage of the analysis when the pressure forces and moments are evaluated. The presence of the fuselage is taken into account when solving for the potential flow solution and the perturbation of the flow over the wings, and is implicitely taken into account when evaluating lift and drag in the Trefftz plane.

In the case of the VLM methods, the contribution of the fuselage is excluded from the analysis altogether.

Up to version 7.23, whenever an analysis of the VLM type was defined, the exclusion of the body panels was kept as a default setting and carried over to analyses of the thick surface type defined subsequently.

The exclusion or not of the body panels is mentioned in the polar's properties.