Correlation of supersonic wind tunnel measurements with a nonlinear aeroelastic theoretical/computational model of a thin plate

Abstract

Supersonic wind tunnel test data is compared with a nonlinear aeroelastic computational model, considering a freestream flow with Mach nearly 2, coupled cavity, and no-shock impingement. The measurements include Limit Cycle Oscillations (LCO) for the given set of flow and structural parameters. The effect of a static pressure differential, temperature differential, and the type of LCO is also studied: periodic or chaotic. A fully coupled aero-thermal–acoustic–elastic analysis was carried out, where the strong dependency of the dynamic instability upon the in-plane boundary stiffness was discovered. Associated with aerodynamic and acoustic formulations, the nonlinearities from the structure are found to be the strongest factor determining the occurrence and character of LCO. At the same time, the cavity effect was found to be negligible for this experimental configuration. Additionally, a comparison analysis was performed on the aerodynamic model for this flow condition between the Linear Piston Theory and the Full Potential Aerodynamics. The calculation of the critical flutter boundary was also performed in terms of the static pressure differential between the cavity pressure and the panel surface pressure, presenting regions where the panel is in static deformation due to the pressure differential versus LCO response. The comparison with the analytical model showed good agreement with the measured data, achieving a similar panel displacement at three-quarters of the panel length as well as the expected behavior of periodicity or chaos for specific values of temperature and static pressure differential.