The Collaborative Research Center SFB 401: Flow Modulation and Fluid-Structure

Interaction at Airplane Wings investigates numerically and experimentally fundamental

problems of very high capacity aircraft having large elastic wings. This issue summarizes

the findings of the 12-year research program at RWTH Aachen University which

was funded by the Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) from 1997 through

2008. The research program covered the following three main topics of large transport

aircraft: (i) Model flow, wakes, and vortices of airplanes in high-lift-configuration,

(ii) Numerical tools for large scale adaptive flow simulation based on multiscale

analysis and a parametric mapping concept for grid generation, and (iii) Validated

computational design tools based on direct aeroelastic simulation with reduced

structural models.