Trimmed simulation of a transport aircraft using fluid-structure coupling

Trimmed simulation of a transport aircraft using fluid-structure coupling

Michler, A.K.
Dwight, R.P.
Heinrich, R.

Aerospace Engineering

Aerodynamics & Wind Energy

2009-06-01

The accurate prediction of the aerodynamic coefficients under cruise conditions is of major importance for assessing the aircraft’s fuel consumption. To this end, fluid dynamics, structural mechanics and flight mechanics have to be considered: on the one hand, the structure elastically deforms under the influence of the flow and a state of static aeroelastic equilibrium is reached; on the other hand, the aircraft’s loads are balanced by adjusting control surfaces, which influences the flow. A procedure has been developed to account for this interplay. For the interaction between fluid and structure (FSI), a partitioned approach is followed to make use of highly-specialized solvers for each discipline: for the equations governing the flow, the hybrid RANS DLR-TAU-code is employed, whereas for the structural equations, ANSYS is used. The trimmed states are computed using a Newton method, in which the derivatives are calculated using finite difference approximations or, alternatively, using the discrete adjoint. The first test case shows the trim results for a 2-dimensional wing-tail configuration, comparing the approach using finite difference approximations with the one using the discrete adjoint. The second test case uses finite differences for finding the trimmed state for the DLR-F12 transport aircraft configuration in viscous flow, comparing the results of a rigid aircraft with the ones where the wing was allowed to deform elastically.

fluid-structure interaction
partitioned approach
trim procedure

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:7e28f6dc-ba88-4329-823f-73827471efae

International Center for Numerical Methods in Engineering (CIMNE)

Coupled Problems 2009: 3rd International Conference on Computational Methods for Coupled Problems in Science and Engineering, 8-10 June 2009, Ischia Island, Italy

Institutional Repository

conference paper

(c) 2009 The Author(s); CIMNE