Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.
AIAA-97-1829
MODERN PANEL METHOD TECHNIQUES FOR
MODELLING WAKE-BODY INTERFERENCE
A Terzi and T W Chiu
School of Engineering, University of Exeter
North Park Road, Exeter EX4 4QF, UK
Abstract
This paper* describes some techniques recently
developed for modelling the aerodynamics of bodies
using the panel method. The computational scheme is
based on 'External Neumann' boundary conditions
and it uses a piecewise constant distribution of source
on non-lifting bodies and source plus doublet on
lifting bodies. Vortex filaments are used to model the
trailing vortex wake behind lifting bodies. The new
techniques are developed for the interaction between
vortex wakes and solid bodies and for the evaluation
of velocity components close to a body surface.
Introduction
In modelling the aerodynamics of complex bodies,
the study of wake/body interference is of great
importance (see, for instance, Dutt et al9, Katz et al13
and Lamarre et al15). In a panel method computation,
such interactions have always been difficult to deal
with. This is because the shape of the vortex wake is
usually not known a priori. When the common wake
relaxation technique is applied, the vortex filaments
in the wake may not always be able to circumvent
obstacles downwind of the wing, and can easily go
through the surface panels of the obstacles. Another
difficulty is usually called the Close Approach
Problem. The induced velocity at any point close to
the edge of a surface panel with a low order
singularity distribution is usually unduly high. If a
vortex filament moves towards an edge, it will
experience very high velocities and will be moved a
1
Copyright © 1997 by A Terzi and T W Chiu.
Published by the American Institute of Aeronautics
and Astronautics, Inc. with permission.
long distance even within a very small time-step. On
the other hand, if one tries to evaluate the surface
pressure close to a panel edge, the pressure will be
unduly low for the same reason. In most higher order
panel method formulations, the tendency of the
velocity to approach infinity at the edges of the panels
may also arise.
The Close Approach Method (CAM) uses
interpolation between the velocities at the control
points to determine the velocities near the surface.
The process ensures a smooth velocity field around
solid bodies modelled with panels even when the
observation point is very close to the surface. The use
of this method is particularly beneficial in computing
wake relaxation because it assumes that the flow is
parallel to the surface, thus strictly enforcing the
boundary condition. Therefore the method can
prevent the relaxed wake vortices from passing
through the surface despite the modification of the
velocity field due to the moved wake.
The Slice Method (SM) aims to avoid the assumption
that the panel strengths are fixed during the wake
relaxation. With this method the influence of the
wake deformation is taken into account and the body
panel source or doublet strengths are updated in each
wake iteration. However, to improve the efficiency of
the computation, only the strength of the panels on
the part (or slice) of the body closest to the vortex
filament being considered is updated. In this way the
body panel strengths are constantly updated by the
relaxing wake, which in turn update the strengths of
the vortex filaments in the wake. This results in
unproved modelling of the interaction between the
body and the wake. In particular, the velocity field
within the slice due to the combined influence of the
surface panels and the vortex filaments now satisfies
the boundary condition on the body, and therefore the
vortices would not pass through the body.
Finally, the Choice of the Control Point Method
which uses the 'cosine law' to evaluate both the
 Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.
discretisation of the surface into panels and the
position of the control point on the states panels on
lifting bodies surface allow to get more accurate
velocity values.
General Background
When compared with the other schemes, the inviscid
incompressible panel method has the principal
advantage that the elements (and hence the
unknowns) are situated only on the surface
(boundary) of the configuration and not throughout
the external space. Thus the order of the problem is
reduced by one, which enables very complex
geometries to be handled, while the number of
unknowns is kept to a tolerable level. Furthermore,
since only the surface of the configuration is
discretised, the boundary mesh generation is much
simpler than most other numerical schemes. With the
Panel Method, the aerodynamics of a large number of
designs can be investigated very quickly with
computers affordable by small companies.
By allowing some approximations, the Panel Method
can produce acceptably accurate results for a large
number of designs within a realistic time scale. The
fundamental mathematics underlying the Panel
Method techniques applies rigorously only to
incompressible, inviscid flow for which the governing
equation is Laplace's equation
(i)
where <j) is the velocity potential, while satisfying
some boundary conditions on the boundary S. By
analysing the expression of potential in terms of
surface integrals (Green's theorem) the total field
(related to the idealised physical field and subject to
its boundary conditions) is formed by the onset field
(the combined 'unperturbed' field associated with the
'outer boundary' and with any such fixed
singularities) and the perturbation field (the
perturbation potential and perturbation velocity due
to the introduction of the inner surfaces). By looking
at the velocity potential form, it can be seen that the
singularity distributions (source and/or doublets) of
unknown density may be considered to produce the
perturbation potential that together with the onset
potential gives the total potential. This concept forms
the basis of the 'Surface Singularity Techniques'
(Panel Method) of which numerous varieties
exist5-12-14-19.
Making use of Green's theorem and of potential flow
theory, the potential at an observation point P can be
expressed by its value on the boundary S as
(2)
where <7 is the source density per unit area on S, ju
is the doublet density per unit area on S and r is the
length of the vector f from the point Q on S and the
point P.
The gradient of equation (2) gives the induced
velocity UP at the observation point P
(3)
Imposing the External Neumann Boundary conditions
on a set of control points, a system of linear equations
is obtained, the matrix form of which is
(4)
in which the unknowns %j give the strength of the
singularities on the panels. After the solution of this
system of linear equations, velocities, pressures,
forces and moments can be evaluated both on the
surface of the bodies and in the space around them.
For more details on the various Panel Method
formulations see, for instance, Chiu2"3'5"7, Chiu et al4,
Hess10, Hunt11'12, Katz et al14, Roggero et al19 and
Smith et al20.
Panel Methods can be used to study hypothetical
aerodynamic cases of zero Mach number and infinite
Reynolds number for which there is no effect of
compressibility and for which viscous effects are
confined to infinitesimally thick layers of fluid
adjacent to the configuration surface and in its wake.
The methods can also give useful results for non-zero
(sub-critical) Mach numbers and for flows in which
viscous effects are not negligible. This explains the
big effort on research aimed to develop new panel
method techniques which allow more realistic
numerical modelling of the problem to be studied in
order to complement the more traditional and very
expensive facilities offered by the wind tunnel.
 Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.

Close Approach Method

The three-dimensional panel method used for the (5)

studies reported in this paper is based on the External
Neumann boundary condition and it adopts a
piecewise constant source and doublet distribution on
the panels. This formulation leads to the problem that
the velocities tend to infinity at the panel edges and
reliable surface velocities can only be found at the
control points12. Indeed this can be easily explained
by recalling, for instance, that a panel with a
piecewise constant doublet distribution is equivalent
to having a vortex ring round its edges11. Therefore
singularities exist in the induced velocity field close
to the edges.
The Close Approach Method uses the method of
interpolation between the velocities at the control
where A, B and C are the coefficients obtain from the
coefficients of the plane of interpolation, k is the
selected control point number, xk and zk are the co-
ordinates of the k* owned control point expressed in
the global reference system and M is the number of
control points selected. By imposing the 'least'
condition we obtain a system of linear equations that
can be easily solved by the Lower-Upper
Decomposition method. Once the coefficients A, B
and C are known they can be used to evaluate the
flow velocity component at P in the / direction, Vpi.
A similar approach can be used to evaluate the
A

points (which can be found reliably) to determine the velocity component at P in the j direction, Vpj.
velocities near the surface while strictly imposing
fluid continuity. More specifically, considering a
local reference system (that will be described later)
the velocity components in two of the directions are
obtained by interpolation while the one in the third
direction is determined by the continuity equation.

If the velocity is required at a particular point P, the

nearest node N1 on the body is determined first. If the
perpendicular distance from this node to the
observation point is less than a certain distance (circa
1 panel size) then the interpolation scheme is used.
The velocities at the control points of the panels
which have this node as one of the corners are used.
Let us call them "owned control points". These are
transformed from the global co-ordinate system to a Fig.l: Selection of the panels that belong to
local one. One of the three principal directions of this the 'nearest node N^.
orthogonal local co-ordinate system is the normal unit
vector calculated as the mean of the normal unit
vectors of the panels concerned (nm ). (see Fig 1)
The normal velocity component can be calculated by
applying the continuity equation. By making use of
The other two principal directions are thus tangential
^ *. the truncated Taylor series expansions for Vpi and Vpj,
to the body surface (i,j). the equations used to evaluate them by means of the
least squares method and the continuity equation
Now the velocities in the direction of the two
tangential principal axes need to be evaluated. This
Pi Pnm
can be done by linear interpolation using the (6)
velocities calculated at the control points of the dn
panels concerned. If there are more than three control
points involved, the least squares method is (Fig.2) we can finally evaluate Vpn .
performed. The sum of the squared difference K Finally, the velocity components at P are transformed
between the value of the velocity component Vki in to the global reference system.
s*.

direction / at each point and the corresponding point

on the plane of interpolation has got the form
 Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.
Fig.2: Imposition of the continuity equation for the
velocity component in nm direction.
The use of this method is particularly beneficial
because it assumes that the flow is parallel to the
surface, thus automatically enforcing the boundary
condition. Therefore it will prevent the relaxed wake
vortices from passing through the surface despite the
modification of the velocity field due to the moved
wake.
Slice Method
In some panel method application codes, the panel
strengths were assumed to be fixed during the wake
relaxation. The assumption was made simply because
resolving for the panel strengths on the entire body at
every stage would be too time-consuming. Clearly,
this is an incorrect assumption since the movement of
the vortices does induce a velocity field which will
affect the global velocity field and hence the panel
strengths. Furthermore, the investigation of the
induced velocity field- showed that if the panel
strengths are not constantly updated, the wake will
tend to pass through the body surface. This is
extremely undesirable and must be avoided.
WAKE RELAXATION PROCEDURE
A 3D-\vake is a region of rotational fluid which carry
away the vorticity generated within the Boundary
Layer on the physical configuration; in the limit of
infinite Re the wake is of infinitesimal thickness and
force-free stream surface of the mean flow. The
Velocity Potential and the direction of the tangential
velocity are discontinuous across such a sheet. The
normal derivative of the potential is continuous (and
equal to zero) by virtue of the zero-force condition if
it is assumed that the wake entrains no fluid from the
adjacent domains.Hunt12
Wake Modelling
The lifting bodies vortex sheets are discretised by
doublet panels of constant doublet distribution. This
is then equivalent to having a vortex lattice extending
downstream and, because of the constancy of the
doublet distribution, we end up dealing with vortex
filaments. The vortex circulation is calculated by
applying the Kutta-Joukowski condition. The wake is
defined in a geometric way and the initial position is
prescribed. The doublet strength over the wake is
found by iterating until the pressures on the upper and
lower sides of the trailing edge are equal. During this
iteration the wake geometry is modified.
A vortex wake is required behind lifting surfaces to
satisfy both the Helmholtz circulation constraints and
the Kutta condition for which the flow must leave the
trailing edge smoothly1. Since the circulation of each
vortex segment relates directly and linearly to the
doublicity of the trailing edge panels, the influence
coefficients can be included in the corresponding
entries of the influence coefficient matrix.
The wake is modelled by vortex filaments of constant
circulation along its length. Each vortex filament is
made up of a number of straight vortex segments. In
order to get more accurate results the vortex segments
closer to the bodies should be of shorter length with
respect to the ones further away. Initially the wake is
assumed to be fixed and with this configuration the
influence coefficient matrix is evaluated. Then the
strength of the singularities is evaluated by means of
an iterative solution method. Finally, the wake
relaxation procedure is performed as an iterative
procedure. At each iteration the wake is analysed
station by station (Fig.3) and at each station the
nodal displacements are calculated and the nodes
(vortex segments joints) are properly displaced.
As a compromised measure, the present method
updates the strength of only a small number of panels,
which are the closest to the vortex filaments
concerned. In other words, only a small but greatly
influenced part of the system of linear equation is
solved at each relaxation step. In the present
formulation, the panels are chosen form a "slice" of
 Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.

the body (Fig.4a, 4b), hence the method is called the and will be solved by a modified Gauss-Seidel
Slice Method. iteration technique.

Note that solving the system which contains the

modifications induced by the wake means to impose
the boundary conditions of non-permeability to the
new flow configuration. This prevents the vortices
from passing through the body surface at each
relaxation step. The velocities in the wake vortex
filaments are men determined and the wake relaxation
can be carried on. The Slice Method procedure will
have to be performed at each relaxation step.

nodo N sulta scia

Fig.3: y-stations for the wake relaxation procedure.

Before calculating the velocities on the filaments at a

particular y-station (being the free-stream in the y
direction) the velocities on the panels upstream and
downstream from this y-position within a certain
distance are found, and then the panels strengths are
resolved. Then, by using the Biot-Savart law, the
velocity induced by all the wake vortices on the
panels within a certain streamwise distance from the
node are found. The normal components of these
N
induced velocities will be subtracted from the 'initial'
normal velocity components (in this context the word
'initial' means 'previous' since the wake relaxation is
an iterative procedure) and the resulting velocity
variations AF^ (where / goes through the panels of
slice) can be considered as due to the freestream.
Recalling the linear system of equations to be solved
for the singularities strength (equation (4)), where Fig.4a,4b: Slice method within the wake relaxation
iterative procedure.
\/3k\ is the vector that contains the boundary
conditions, the AFj values will have to be added to
the relative entries of the right hand side vector. The
The updating of panel strengths of the panels
obtained system of linear equations will have the
contained in the slice will significantly improve the
form accuracy while keeping the computational time within
a reasonable tolerance. It is worth noting that the
(7) wake deformation greatly affects the flow field
(Lamarre et al15). Therefore the Slice Method, which
 Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.

ensures more precise evaluation of wake deformation,
produces more accurate results.
Choice Of The Control Points
The local induced velocities are very important for
the design optimisation of devices such as winglets,
wingtip stores, closed-coupled tandem wings.
Therefore, when studying wake-body and bodies
interference the correct evaluation of the local
induced velocities is desirable. Since the induced
velocities cause downwash the effective angle of
attack changes which causes induced drag, a better
evaluation of this effect gives a better estimation of
the velocity values and hence of the force on the
wing.
Dumitrescu8 demonstrated that by both panelling a
wing body and choosing the control points of the
panels accordingly to the 'cosine law', more accurate
induced velocity values can be obtained.
experimentally showed that the cosine spacing
significantly improves the accuracy of the drag
calculated by the PPA. Nevertheless the Trefftz-plane
integration of the rolled-up wake was found to be
very sensitive to errors in wake shape, Smith and
Kroo20. Since the wake geometry is generated from a
vortex-lattice method, the use of the PPA on lifting
bodies panelled in according to the cosine law results
remarkably accurate.
Results
The CAM and the SM were implemented in a panel
method code. The code was then tested using a case
of an obstacle (an ellipsoid) placed behind a
rectangular wing of NACA 0010 section. 523 source
panels were used on the ellipsoid while a combined
334 source plus doublet panels were used on the
wing. Each wake vortex filament consists of 20
streamwise segments. The symmetry of the
configuration was made use of in the computation.

From the mathematical consistency of the relationship
between the analytically correct formulation of the
induced velocity calculation and the approximation
by the Panel Method, it follows that, by using the
lifting line theorem for wings such that the circulation
distribution can be developed as a trigonometric
polynomial form, a discretised approximation of the
Prandtl's equation and of the integral for the induced
velocity can be obtained by replacing the wing with a
system of horse-shoe vortices IF the division in
panels is operated according to the cosine law and IF
the control points are chosen at half distance of the
edges of the panel considering as a spatial variable
the local angle 9 , which is related to the co-ordinate
that goes along the chord, by the expression
Figures 5 - 7 show the bodies and the rolled up
vortex wake from three different points of view at an
angle of attack of 0°. Figure 5 shows the
configuration viewed from downstream. It is clear
that the wake is able to circumvent the ellipsoid
smoothly. One can see the interaction between the
two bodies. The shape of the wake clearly differs
from what one would normally expect without an
obstacle.

y=- (8)

where b is the wing span.

As far as the authors are aware of, the theory above

has been tested only for isolated wings. In the
research reported in this paper the same theory has
been used within the calculation of wing-wake and
wing-body interference. The results showed that also
for these configurations the accuracy had improved.

Letcher16 outlined the superior accuracy and

convergence properties of the far-field analysis by
Trefftz-plane integration (FFA) with respect to the
near-field force calculation (PPA). Beside that, he Figure 5
 Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.

Figure 6 Figure 8

Figure 7 Figure 9

Figures 8 - 1 0 show the same configuration at an

angle of attack of 16°. The ability of the vortex wake
to go round the ellipsoid close to its surface is shown
clearly in figure 9. Once again the CAM and the SM
ensure that the vortices do not go through the body.
 Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.
Figure 10
To illustrate numerically the advantage of the close
approach method, we computed the pressure
coefficients close to the surface of the same ellipsoid
in a potential flow in the x-direction. The ellipsoid
surface is described by the ellipsoidal co-ordinates, £,
u, and q> which are related to the Cartesian co-
ordinates:
x = c/<
z=
where c is half the distance between the foci of the
ellipsoid, "£ = constant" represents an ellipsoidal
surface for -l<u<l and -7c<<p<7i. For the ellipsoid we
used, c = 0.284 m, £ = 1.157. The points at which
analytical and computed pressure coefficients are
compared are along the line of intersection of the
plane 9 = 0 and the ellipsoidal surface C, = 1.169. The
points are thus effectively about 5 mm from the
surface. In Figure 7, the pressure coefficients are
plotted against the values of u. It can be seen that the
results from the close approach method agree well
with theory even though the points are very close to
the surface.
Conclusions
The use of the CAM and the SM has greatly
improved the ability of the panel method in modelling
the flow around bodies in which the interaction
between the vortex wakes and body parts is common.
While the CAM allows the correct evaluation of the
velocity field close to a boundary surface, the SM
enables the precise modelling of wake-body
interference. The simple example illustrated in this
paper was chosen because, despite its simplicity,
remarkable interference was likely to be observed.
—— AnalyticarResults
O Panel Method with Close Approach Method
Figure 11
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Copyright© 1997, American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics, Inc.