An important prerequisite for the design, assessment and certification of aircraft and their associated control systems is a quantitative specification of the environment in which the aircraft is intended to operate, for example, atmospheric gust. Gust loads on aircraft may induce detrimental influences such as increased aerodynamic and structural loads, structural deformation and decreased flight dynamic performance. This paper presents a systematic and comprehensive overview of important concepts and applications of gust loads on aircraft. This overview includes a brief research background, concepts, research techniques, influences and load alleviation measures of gust. Finally, we summarise some potential improvements in the future work. It is also recommended to learn from previous experiences to avoid aviation accidents due to flight through atmospheric gusts and turbulence.

Numerical simulations that are conducted on a transport-type airfoil, NACA 64-210, at a Reynolds number of2.6×106and LWC of 25 g/m³explore the aerodynamic penalties and mechanisms that affect airfoil performance in heavy rain conditions. Our simulation results agree well with the experimental data and show significant aerodynamic penalties for the airfoil in heavy rain. The maximum percentage decrease inCLis reached by 13.2% and the maximum percentage increase inCDby 47.6%. Performance degradation in heavy rain at low angles of attack is emulated by an originally creative boundary-layer-tripped technique near the leading edge. Numerical flow visualization technique is used to show premature boundary-layer separation at high angles of attack and the particulate trajectories at various angles of attack. A mathematic model is established to qualitatively study the water film effect on the airfoil geometric changes. All above efforts indicate that two primary mechanisms are accountable for the airfoil aerodynamic penalties. One is to cause premature boundary-layer transition at low AOA and separation at high AOA. The other occurs at times scales consistent with the water film layer, which is thought to alter the airfoil geometry and increase the mass effectively.

Tiltrotor aerodynamic interaction, especially in the transition mode, is a necessary consideration for tiltrotor aerodynamics, and structural design and optimization. Previous studies have paid much attention to the helicopter mode. However, due to the substantial complexity of the problem, only a small amount of work on the transition mode has been done so far. In this paper, the rotor–wing aerodynamic interaction of a scaled V-22 Osprey tiltrotor, both in the helicopter and transition modes, are studied by computational fluid dynamics (CFD) numerical simulation. The flow field is discretized via the chimera mesh technique and then solved with the Reynolds-averaged Navier–Stokes (RANS) equations. The rotational acceleration of the rotor is considered as a source term added on the right side of the momentum equation of the RANS equations. Both a quasi-steady and a fully transient method are employed to simulate the tilt motion of the rotor in the transition mode. Both qualitative and quantitative results are presented and discussed on the aerodynamic forces, flow physics, and mechanisms. The applicability of the extensively used quasi-steady method for rotor tilt simulation is revealed.