INTRODUCTION The fuel systems on modern multi-engine aircraft must function flawlessly for many different operational scenarios and must be designed to conform to very strict functional specifications as required by the FAA. These requirements as related to this paper as laid out in the CFR 10 specification include:
There are several other requirements that the system designer must consider as well but they do not directly relate to the performance of the system which is the focus of this white paper. It is the intention of this paper to describe the basic design aspects of an aircraft fuel system and how FloMASTER can be used to provide accurate insight into the performance of the system. We will specifically looking at a typical ground refueling scenario. There will be a series of follow up papers that will look at the more complex design considerations such as fuel tank inerting and fuel system control strategies. FloMASTER is a one dimensional computational fluid dynamics simulation tool that allows engineers to simulate complex thermo-fluid problems at a system level, so that they can understand aspects of the design such as pressure, temperatures, and flow rates though out the design. The designer can investigate both steady state and transient behavior in their systems this white paper will look at examples of both. FloMASTER also has a host of speciality solvers for both complex phenomenon like swirl and priming, or for making potentially repetitive tasks simple such as performing a flow balancing analysis. |