Variable-Fidelity Aeroservoelastic Analysis Tool for Concept Evaluation, Design and Wind-Tunnel Test Support

Ongoing work in advanced air-vehicles, such as ultra-light-weight truss-braced and elastically tailored concepts is beginning to provide the insight necessary to meet NASA's N+3 transport system goals. Unfortunately, contemporary analysis methods are unsuited for aeroservoelastic analysis of such configurations suffering from accessibility, usability, fidelity or resource constraints. Design tools have typically been developed using configuration dependent low-fidelity approaches that are unsuitable to reliably analyze advanced configurations. Contemporary aeromechanics solvers (i.e. viscous compressible Computational Fluid Dynamics coupled to Finite Element structural models) can analyze advanced concepts, but require significant user input to support advanced configurations, not to mention extensive computational resources. What has long been needed is an approach that bridges the middle ground to enable aeroservoelastic analysis at the "appropriate level of fidelity for the problem at hand", while reliably permitting the novel application of aeroelastic knowledge to new concepts, in addition to supporting wind-tunnel and flight tests by enabling the efficient investigation of flight dynamics, flutter, stability and control. By exploiting Continuum Dynamics Inc.'s extensive experience developing fully-coupled aeromechanics methods, we propose the development of a new rapid, reliable, variable–fidelity first-principles physics-based aeroservoelastic analysis to support concept evaluation, wind-tunnel/flight testing and design.