Unsteady Design Optimization for Aeroelasticity Applications

Aeroelasticity plays an important role in the design and development of highly flexible flight vehicles and blended wing body configurations. The operating margins on these flight systems are limited by non-linear unsteady phenomena such as stall, flutter, gusts, limit cycle oscillations, vortex roll-up which exhibit strong coupling between the aero-loads and structural deformations. The use of high-fidelity time domain methods such as CFD/FEM during the design phase has been limited by the cost of computing the unsteady physics. In this proposal researchers from CRAFT Tech and Georgia Tech offer a collaborative inter-disciplinary design optimization approach to aeroelasticity problems with high fidelity aerodynamics analysis and structural dynamics. This approach is primarily feasible because of the development of a novel unsteady analysis procedure that reconstructs the unsteady dynamics with high accuracy and nominal cost. The reconstruction procedure combines CFD and FEM with a modified Proper Orthogonal Decomposition method and an Artificial Neural Network to simulate the unsteady aeroelastic features associated with different shape designs with good reliability. Furthermore, the process of reconstructing the unsteady solution permits the incorporation of control strategies and time variant system responses making it appealing for the aeroservoelasticity class of problems.