Further Investigation of the Support System Effects and Wing Twist on the NASA Common Research Model

An experimental investigation of the NASA Common Research Model was conducted in the NASA Langley National Transonic Facility and NASA Ames 11-foot Transonic Wind Tunnel Facility for use in the Drag Prediction Workshop. As data from the experimental investigations was collected, a large difference in moment values was seen between the experiment and computational data from the 4th Drag Prediction Workshop. This difference led to a computational assessment to investigate model support system interference effects on the Common Research Model. The results from this investigation showed that the addition of the support system to the computational cases did increase the pitching moment so that it more closely matched the experimental results, but there was still a large discrepancy in pitching moment. This large discrepancy led to an investigation into the shape of the as-built model, which in turn led to a change in the computational grids and re-running of all the previous support system cases. The results of these cases are the focus of this paper.