Aeroelastic Effects of Spinning Missiles

Abstract

.The accurate computation of forces and moments is of paramount importance in the computation of the maneuvering response of an aerospace vehicle, particularly for spinning missiles. For spinning missiles, the combination of body spin and angle of attack creates a force, called the Magnus force, at right angles to the lift vector. This force induces a moment that can perturb the dynamic stability of the missile, and flight control of the vehicle is no longer ensured. The solution for axisymmetric configurations can be predicted with steady-state algorithms. The addition of control surfaces creates an additional opposing lateral force and the flow is no longer steady and unsteady methods must be used to compute the solution. The purpose of the current work is to examine the aeroelastic effects on the aerodynamic performance of a spinning missile with dithering canards utilizing a fully-coupled computational aeroelastic approach. The nonlinearity of the flow field (e.g. moving shocks) and the complicated aerodynamic interactions at the canard- and finbody junctures necessitates the use of a computational aeroelasticity approach.