Importance of Aerodynamic Load Corrections on the Aeroelastic Tailoring of Composite Aircraft Wings

Importance of Aerodynamic Load Corrections on the Aeroelastic Tailoring of Composite Aircraft Wings

Ratan Parkhe, K.K.

De Breuker, R. (mentor)

Aerospace Engineering

Aerospace Structures and Materials

2016-10-28

The importance of aeroelastic tailoring is increasing continuously as the aircraft wings become more and more flexible. Incorporating aeroelastic considerations in the early part of the design process has a lot of benefits. But these require significant computational resources if accurate predictions are needed. This is more relevant these days when most of the commercial aircraft operate in the transonic regime. To predict the flow phenomena that occur at such conditions, accurate CFD results are needed. These can be computationally expensive in the early stages of design. To overcome these restrictions, various multi-fidelity approaches are gaining wide acceptance. These methods include a low-fidelity model that does bulk of the work and a high-fidelity model that provides corrections that fill in the deficiencies in the low-fidelity model. The aim is to achieve a high-fidelity result without performing as many high-fidelity computations. These become even more attractive in the context of aeroelastic tailoring as in an optimization routine performing a high-fidelity analysis is infeasible. For this thesis, a defect-correction based multi-fidelity approach has been implemented in an aeroelastic tailoring routine. The Vortex Lattice Method (VLM) was used as the low-fidelity model and SU2 was used as the high-fidelity compressible solver. The designs from the multi-fidelity approach have been compared with the corresponding ones obtained from a purely low-fidelity optimization. To correlate the effects of compressibility with the difference in design, this study was performed at 3 flow speeds; low-subsonic, high-subsonic and transonic. The results for both the subsonic cases are on expected lines, where both the designs closely resemble each other. The designs at transonic speeds show an intersting behavior where the multi-fidelity design is slightly heavier than the low-fidelity design. This was seen to be primarily due to the difference in the aerodynamic torsional moments in the two models due to the presence of a shockwave which was captured by the high-fidelity model. Based on these findings, certain conclusions have been made and recommendations for future work have been provided.

http://resolver.tudelft.nl/uuid:b36760db-c9fe-4ab5-8112-72b2c9b097ce

Student theses

master thesis

(c) 2016 Ratan Parkhe, K.K.