Development of an Efficient Flutter and Limit Cycle Oscillation Predictive Tool

In this Phase II effort, an accurate, user-friendly, well validated, and production-ready efficient flutter and Limit Cycle Oscillation (LCO) predictive tool will be developed. The ZONA Euler Unsteady Solver (ZEUS) will be first modified to improve its computational efficiency by automating the load balancing Message Passing Interface (MPI) and to incorporate a time-accurate boundary layer method. The reduced order structural modeling will be enhanced to include the nonlinear stiffness effects, to account for aircraft-to-aircraft variability/uncertainty, and to consider more complex dissipation tensor models. A weapons database containing ZEUS meshes for modeling various weapons/stores will be established to facilitate the development of the ZEUS model for a massive number of aircraft with stores configurations. The enhanced structural reduced order model will be incorporated into ZEUS to develop a Nonlinear Aerodynamics and Nonlinear Structure Interactions (NANSI) module for LCO predictions of aircraft with stores configurations. This ZEUS with NANSI module will be further validated with the flight test data of many F-16 with stores configurations to establish guidelines for identifying dissipation model parameters for new aircraft with stores configurations. The outcome of the Phase II effort will be a production-ready LCO predictive tool for commercialization.