Aeroelastic Design of High Performance Supersonic Aircrafts

Abstract

Supersonic aircrafts experience intense flow-characteristic changes because of shock waves while they are passing through the transonic flow region. These anomalous changes can cause dangerous aeroelastic problems, such as flutter. Hence, it is very important to design an aircraft to be able to avoid the aeroelastic instability. In this study, a nonlinear aeroelastic analysis system is developed using coupled numerical techniques of computational fluid dynamics (CFD) and computational structural dynamics (CSD). For efficient computation, the structural dynamic solver of the developed system is based on the modal approach, and aerodynamic solver is based on the modified transonic small-disturbance (TSD) equation. Detailed aeroelastic simulation results in transonic and supersonic regimes are provided to show the aeroelastic characteristics of several aircraft models. In addition, a discussion of how to apply this technology to the actual design process of high-performance aircraft is presented.