Inviscid Flow: Supersonic Flow Over F-16 Aircraft

What You'll Build

This lesson walks you through a CFD simulation of supersonic inviscid flow over an F-16 fighter aircraft. Flying at 400 m/s — about Mach 1.16, comfortably above the speed of sound — the aircraft experiences a flow field dominated by pressure and inertia rather than viscosity. By assuming the fluid is inviscid (zero shear stress), you isolate the pressure-driven physics responsible for aerodynamic lift, making this an ideal case for understanding the fundamentals of high-speed external aerodynamics.

What You'll Learn

• What inviscid flow means, when the assumption is valid, and how it simplifies the Navier–Stokes equations to Bernoulli's equation

• Why supersonic flow is inherently compressible, and how the Mach number quantifies that compressibility

• How to import and position a 3-D F-16 aircraft model inside a flow enclosure using SpaceClaim

• How to generate an unstructured mesh (~979,000 elements) around a complex aircraft geometry using Fluent Meshing

• How to set up the inviscid viscous model with ideal-gas air density for a compressible supersonic case

• A key practical technique: using a pressure-based solver with coupled pressure–velocity coupling instead of the density-based solver, to avoid common convergence problems at supersonic speeds

• How to post-process pressure and velocity contours, identifying the high-pressure region beneath the wings that produces lift

• How to interpret the coupling between pressure, density, and temperature in compressible flow

Why It Matters

Inviscid supersonic analysis is a fast, robust first step in aircraft and missile design — giving you lift and pressure distributions without the cost of resolving boundary layers. The pressure-based-solver technique you learn here is a genuinely valuable trick for taming difficult high-speed simulations.