An Efficient Fluid-Structure Interpolation and Mesh Motion Scheme for Large Aeroelastic Simulations

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Radial basis functions are used to simultaneously provide a solution to the problems of mesh motion and fluid-structure interpolation for large aeroelastic simulations. The efficiency of the fluid-structure technique is improved by adopting a pointwise partition of unity, which localises the force transfer from the fluid but also minimises the number of matrix entries needed to move an aerodynamic point from the structure. Mesh motion efficiency is increased by reducing the number of surface points used to define deformations of the surface, and the minor error in position that this implies at other surface points is corrected with a simple decaying peturbation. This means the exact surface is retained, but the mesh motion is significantly faster. Example time-accurate aeroelastic simulations are performed on meshes of 125×10 and 10 cells to demonstrate the capability for large meshes, and to investigate the mesh dependency of the time history. For the 10 cell mesh, the efficient strategies presented here enabled the number of non-zero entries in the coupling matrix to be reduced by 47× and the number of surface points used to define the mesh motion by 64×.